itch.io

I can’t speak to the experience of others, but, as far as what the client is currently capable of downloading and launching goes, I’ve personally downloaded and played several games larger than 1GB through the itch.io desktop client (I’m not using some special version of it and I doubt that the Linux build of it is functionally different from the Windows build). I don’t know what things were like years and years ago, but this has been my experience for the past two to three years now.

After doing a quick search online to try and see where this notion comes from, I haven’t come across a source for it, but I have come across an interesting community thread: https://itch.io/t/2877073/no-more-excuses-please . As far as I can tell, the 1GB limit is, at least as of the past couple of years, only down to how much hosting Itch is willing to provide a given game, not down to the capabilities of the desktop client. Using Butler for uploading instead of the website is also apparently a way to automatically increase the hosting limit to 2GB, but I obviously haven’t verified that myself and the only thing that the Butler documentation itself says as far as I can tell is that the itch.io backend will reject builds that are over 30GB uncompressed (https://itch.io/docs/butler/pushing.html#:~:text=Limits%3A%20currently%2C%20the%20itch%2Eio%20backend%20will%20reject%20builds%20with%20a%20total%20uncompressed%20size%20that%20exceeds%2030GB ). There is technically one hit in the documentation for “2GB”, but it’s in reference to something unrelated to upload limits (https://itch.io/docs/butler/single-files.html#:~:text=build%2E-,Almost,optimal! ).

If you can provide counterexamples of people being unable to download and/or launch any games over 1GB from the desktop client, or examples of developers stating that they can’t upload the latest update to their game, which now exceeds 1GB, specifically because the desktop client would have issues with it, I’d be happy to take a look at them.