Good day everyone
The problem
Itch.io has 200mb max size as default and in some situations it's not enough. We have tried everything and last effort is to ask here if anyone can maybe provide some guidance how to talk with someone from itch.io staff or any good soul to help us."(We wrote to support mail 6x with only one reply)
Call for help
We would be obliged to anyone for a guidance or help in these kind of situations, what are our options or next steps to try.
Thank you a thousand times.
First of all, 200MB is the limit for each individual file. The game as a whole can be up to 500MB. See the Uploading HTML5 Games FAQ, which also explains why these limits exist, and what you can try if you can't optimize your game. Second, when did you contact support?
Hello and thank you for reply.
Yes we tried to reach out the support of itch.io multiple times (from november 2021 to february 2022) over period of 4 months and also this way today) at the moment all efforts without success, but we are not losing hope.
The individual file size is the limitation in our case as we are decreased 4Gb size of files (over 2000 pictures sounds and animations) into size of just 200mb, we are at the moment at 250mb and can't get lower without rapidly decreasing the quality which would make the game unplayable because of visual artefacts on the images (We have a story game of 50+ hours of gameplay to justify why the game is bigger) Plus we have been working on this project for 4 years so the size added up piece by piece. And we are receiving questions like why we can't do it and the thing is we would love to do it. We are trying as humbly and gently do it here and hope for the lightning to strike and achieve this together.
(NSFW WARNING) This is our page itself: World of Sisters by Sexy Goddess Game Studio
We will answer all the questions if any.
Have a wonderfull day.
We thought about that but the problem is if you play Visual novel like for 4 hours you won't be able to continue elsewhere from your last progress and playing the same content would probably not be viable for majority of audience. I bet the best option would be to release full version, it may not have < 200mb limit but it could be like 250 and work fine and fully. Or more to cover up future updates :-) we have our game available to download for android as well as desktop and using alternative sites to host web version is just a temporary workaround, we would love to have it in here on itch.io because the game is free and we also don't want to have advertisements around it like other sites do. Or at least I believe this is the best approach. Thank you so much for asking the admin in our name, it means a lot. You are a legend!
From what I can see our team already responded to you a while back. We granted the standard increase on your account. If your game can not fit within those requirements then you’ll have to provide a downloadable version to host it on itch.io.
You can read more about why we have limitations here: https://itch.io/docs/creators/html5#zip-file-requirements
Good day
Yes I confirm I have received one feedback about size increase but it didn't work when I tried it. Let me show you the steps as I did upload again from scratch, just to present the situation.
I have a regular .zip file with .html uploaded to itch.io in HTML - play in browser mode
IMG_1 - https://imgur.com/scubX5J (it contains all 3 images)
The individual size is slightly over 200mb limit and the error shown on launch page (during the first time loading web version):
IMG_2 -(same link as above)
When I open the zip file in the browser this is the file mentioned in the error:
IMG_3 -(same link as above)
The individual file size limit is the root cause of this problem I am experiencing. For full detail the original has about 1500mb and we have spend over 2 weeks to decrease the file to the current size, some parts so we achieved 250 mb but we couldn't get it lower no matter what we tried in comply with new game updates as we were at 199mb half year ago.
Can I kindly and humbly ask for a second look in this particular case please. I understand the itch.io rules and I have no objections about it, you have valid reasons to have them and I read many topics on the forum before asking here. We will also keep the downloadable version available, just the number of people asking us for web version on itch.io is increasing and this above mentioned issue the only limitation there is to make it work.
I am gently and maybe a bit desperately asking for your help why the size increase which you have mentioned either didn't applied to our project or maybe if there is anything wrong it to check it.
Thank you for your time and assistance so much. John from WOS team.
I’m sorry but if your game does not fit within the limits then you’ll have to provide it as a downloadable game.
Why do we have limits? Although many game engines allow you to export anything as an HTML5 project, often you need to consider what the user experience of playing the game will be like. You can think of an HTML5 project like a website: many of the same performance optimization recommendations still apply. We have these default limits to encourage developers to consider how their games are distributed, especially since it’s so easy these days to drop in prefab resources from asset-stores that siginificanlty increase the download size for the game.
Just had to force-restart my machine due to a web game that caused the browser to eat up all my RAM and start thrashing too quick for me to react. Large games in a browser are a DDoS attack waiting to happen. By the time your game bumps against the limits set by itch.io, it's already way too large to run in a browser. Please be considerate. Not everyone has an i9 CPU and 32GB of RAM.
I can understand that what you are saying, I truly do. There are many developers who don't tune up performance and assets of their games.
But in our situation we have spend tons of time to tune both memory and performance to reach out even older android devices so this is not our case - we are certain our game runs on even lower specs of the system specs. We have spend months of tuning to make to balance the size/performance/peaks and even decrease the size limit as low as we could, but we reached the technical limits of either cuting huge portions of our latest created content out from the game in web version or ask here.
We simply have 240mb single file which is over 200mb limit and I decided to open this topic and respectfully negotiate the possibility to increase the limit. You have previously discussed with other admin that the limit was increased, but the error is showing us the same thing (over 200mb limit) Can you please help me understand what exactly was increased (No offense I just don't understand it as the results is the same error)
I appreciate highly that you are even discussing this topic with me and I would like to explain our situation calmly and provide the arguments why we are slightly above the individual file size limit, like other games exploit (some are bigger but they have more smaller individual files), I have hope this can be technically set to increase the individual file size limitation. (Unfortunately unity doesn't allow to split the .data file which contains animation+graphics+sounds into more files) We did what we could and over some time the limitation would make better sense to increase anyway , it's 2022 and enabling exceptions to some games would make sense to increase the quality of games on the itch.io platform and I want to cooperate any way I can . it's such an awesome platform and we are humble and honored to be on it. It doesn't make sense to refer people to use different web link to play it in the web browser. I hope I was able to present the topic clearly.
Your assistance would be greatly appreciated by our whole team and many of our followers and fans.
With wish for a brighter future, Project lead - John from World of Sisters Team.
