Bounty Board Arcade vs itch.io for browser games

If you have an HTML5 build and one free afternoon, itch.io is the obvious place to put it. It is usually also the right one.

itch.io is the closest thing indie browser games have to a default home. Its enormous HTML5 catalog sits alongside jams, ratings, tags, devlogs, and community pages, so a game has more than one way to be found after launch.

Bounty Board Arcade is not trying to be that. It is a smaller curated catalog where your game gets a leaderboard through the SDK, the SDK services are free, eligible studios can take a share of the ad revenue their game earns, and the same studio account can hire creators to make content about the game.

Different jobs. Most studios should use both. Here is the honest split.

The direct answer

Publish on itch.io first. It costs nothing, nobody approves you, and an embedded HTML5 game can accept donations. Paid access requires listing the project as Downloadable instead. It also gives the game itch.io's established discovery paths through tags, ratings, jams, devlogs, and community pages.

Submit the same build to Bounty Board Arcade when you want a leaderboard on every run, free SDK services like cloud saves and rewarded ad breaks, placement in a curated catalog instead of a position in a feed, a share of the ad revenue your game earns, and a route into paid creator campaigns.

The Arcade is younger, much smaller, HTML5 only, and reviewed before it goes live. It is a second surface with a specific job, not a replacement for itch.io.

What each one is

itch.io calls itself an open marketplace for independent digital creators with a focus on independent games, and it means open. Its own documentation is blunt about gatekeeping: "it's never necessary to get votes, likes, or follows to get your content approved." You make a page, you upload a zip, you are live. Jams are a first class part of the site rather than a bolt on, and anyone can host one. As of August 2026 the jams page reports 589,033 games created for jams hosted on itch.io.

Bounty Board Arcade is a curated catalog of browser games on bountyboard.gg, attached to a marketplace where studios hire creators. Submitting a game is free and does not require payment setup. Once live, a game comes with play tracking, leaderboards, and audience stats, and the studio that owns it can list it on the marketplace to run creator campaigns.

If you are choosing between six platforms rather than two, our roundup of web game platforms for indie developers covers Poki, CrazyGames, GamePix, and GameMonetize too.

Publishing compared

On itch.io the flow is short. Create a project page, upload a zip whose index.html sits at the root, and tick the box labeled "This file will be played in the browser." That checkbox is the entire gate, and it is what third party guides warn about most: GDevelop's publishing documentation spends its warnings on keeping index.html out of a subfolder, ticking the browser box, and setting the page public.

The HTML5 upload docs give you 500MB of extracted content, 200MB for any single file, and up to 1,000 files. You choose whether the game embeds in the page at fixed dimensions or launches fullscreen on click, and you can flag it mobile friendly. The creator FAQ notes a soft limit of around 20 project pages, raised on request, and custom CSS is manually approved for accessibility reasons.

The Arcade submission is similar in shape and stricter in practice. A studio account uploads a build zip with index.html at the root, uncompressed, up to 64 MB per file, 250 MB total, and 160 files. Then a person reviews it before it goes live, and a review can end in a rejection. Updated builds are reviewed again before they replace the live one, which keeps serving in the meantime.

That tradeoff goes to itch.io: bigger limits, no queue, no reviewer, live at two in the morning if you want.

Money compared

The two platforms make money in ways that barely overlap.

itch.io is a store, but its current HTML5 documentation draws an important line: embedded browser games can accept donations only. To require payment for access, the project has to be listed as Downloadable instead. Its open revenue sharing model still lets the developer choose itch.io's cut, with a default of 10% and a range from 0% to 100%. The payments docs describe two modes: direct to you, where you connect PayPal or Stripe and act as merchant of record, or collected by itch.io, where the platform handles VAT and you request payouts later. Revenue becomes available 7 days after purchase, the minimum payout request is $5, and payment processing is typically about $0.30 plus 2.9% per transaction. The model is sales and donations, not advertising, so there is no ad revenue share to opt into.

The Arcade has no store at all. It pays in two other ways.

The first is advertising. Eligible Arcade studios keep 90% of finalized ad revenue attributed to their game, settled monthly via Stripe once the $50 minimum is reached. Rewarded ad breaks are allowlisted during review for approved games hosted by Bounty Board. That 90% is worth comparing to the norm in HTML5 distribution: GameMonetize's developer page advertises a 45% revenue share with Net 30 payouts, one public data point on what the category normally offers.

The second is creator campaigns. Bounty Board charges a standard 10% platform fee on each side of completed work, and only on completed work: no subscription, no credits, no listing fee. Standard campaigns have no upfront cost, because the studio is charged when it accepts work. Competitions and results based campaigns fund their budget up front through Stripe, the funds are held by Bounty Board, and unused budget is refunded automatically when the campaign closes. Payment is sent to the creator's Stripe account when the studio approves the work, and Stripe holds the payout 7 days for dispute resolution.

If you also have a paid downloadable build, or use the browser version as a demo funnel for one, itch.io does a job the Arcade simply does not do.

Discovery compared

itch.io has the audience, and it will not hand it to you. A survey of 169 developers behind How To Market A Game's itch.io traffic benchmark put median lifetime page views at 1,582, with the 70th percentile at roughly 12,150. The average of 54,483 is dragged upward by a small number of hits. Being correctly published on itch is not the same as being found on itch.

The same data carries a strong argument for shipping a browser build at all. At the 70th percentile, 37% of people who viewed a browser-playable game went on to play it, against 6% for download-only pages. In that benchmark, browser-playable pages converted far more visitors into players than download-only pages.

The Arcade's audience is a fraction of that, and pretending otherwise would be silly. What it offers instead is what curation buys: approval means placement. Games sit on the arcade wall in daily picks, featured rails, and the jump back in row, rather than sliding down a feed of new uploads within a day.

Small and placed is a different bet from large and buried. Which one is better depends on the game, and running both costs you one extra upload.

What the Arcade adds that a store page does not

Four things, and only one of them is marketing.

A leaderboard for your game. Score posting is a free SDK call, not a service you build, host, or subscribe to. Competitive replay can be a low-cost retention mechanic for a small browser game.

The rest of the SDK. Cloud saves, lifecycle events, A/B experiments, allowlisted rewarded ad breaks, and separately approved multiplayer, all free with the submission. On itch, each of those is your problem to solve.

Curation as a signal. A reviewed catalog is smaller by definition. Placement means something because not everything is placed.

The campaign bridge. Because the Arcade sits inside a creator marketplace, real play data from your game page can inform a campaign brief, and the players already on your game page see the resulting creator content first. One caveat worth stating plainly: view based bonuses and results based payouts are measured automatically only for YouTube and Twitch. Work on TikTok, Instagram, X, and websites is reviewed and approved manually.

Where the Arcade is the weaker choice

If the game is a paid title, a downloadable build, or anything that is not HTML5, itch.io is the answer by default. The Arcade takes browser builds only.

If you want to publish today with no reviewer involved, need a page you can restyle with custom CSS, or run your growth through jams, devlogs, and comments, that is itch.io territory and it is not close.

The scale gap is real too. The Arcade is a young catalog with an audience measured in a different unit than itch.io's, so treat it as a second surface with a job, not a substitute.

The strategy we would run

1. Launch on itch.io. Jam entry, devlog, comments, ratings, community, and a store page if the game is for sale.
2. Keep index.html at the root of the build zip so the same archive uploads to both places without repacking.
3. Submit the build to Bounty Board Arcade for leaderboard play, the free SDK services, and the ad revenue share if your game qualifies.
4. Watch what the play data says. Do players start, retry, and climb the board?
5. If the hook lands, run a campaign while the game already has a playable page to send viewers to.

The readiness bar is worth a read first: what makes a browser game arcade ready covers the first minute, the reset loop, and the creator angle, and most of it applies to an itch.io page too.

itch.io is where indie browser games live. The Arcade is where a browser game can pick up a leaderboard, a share of its own ad revenue, and a path to creators who will play it. Use the first one because it is the default for good reasons, and submit to the Arcade when you want the second job done too.

Sources worth reading

• itch.io: About
• itch.io: Uploading HTML5 games
• itch.io: Creator FAQ
• itch.io: Accepting payments and getting paid
• itch.io: Game jams
• GDevelop documentation: Publish to itch.io
• How To Market A Game: Benchmark, itch.io traffic
• GameMonetize: Developers