FAQ
If something here isn't answered, write to admin@talkingpixels.games. Questions that keep coming up get added to this page.
What is this?
A place to publish a game or an asset pack, run a page that looks like yours, keep the people who care about your work, and do the production side without leaving the site. A storefront with the parts a storefront usually leaves out.
It is built and run by one small studio, not a venture-funded company. That shapes most of the answers below.
What does it cost?
Nothing to have an account, publish, post, or use the production tools. There is no paid tier and no subscription.
If you sell something, I take a percentage of the sale and the payment processor takes its own charge. Both are written out with a worked example at /fees. Free listings cost nothing at all, because a free download never reaches a payment processor.
Buyers pay the listed price. Nothing is added at checkout, and my fee comes out of the seller's side.
Who owns what I upload?
You do, entirely. I take a limited licence to do the obvious things — store your files, show your listing, deliver downloads to people who buy or claim them, and promote your listing within this site. Nothing else, nothing exclusive, and it ends when you delete the content.
The exception, which cannot work any other way: someone who already bought your game keeps their copy and their licence to use it. I cannot take that back on your behalf.
Can I sell here and elsewhere?
Yes. Nothing here is exclusive. Publish the same game on as many storefronts as you like.
How do I get paid?
Through Stripe. You connect an account, Stripe verifies who you are, and money for your sales is held briefly before it becomes payable — long enough for refunds and chargebacks to land before the money leaves. The hold period and the payout threshold are both published at /fees.
I never hold your money in a way you cannot see. Every sale, fee and payout is itemised in your dashboard.
How does anything get found here?
Every shelf on the front page says how it was filled — hand-picked by a person, or automatic with the rule named underneath it.
The hype meter is built from wishlists, devlogs, reactions and backings, decayed over a month so that something from last year cannot sit at the top forever. Rising and falling compares last week against the week before, not a number against itself.
Featured placement is not for sale. Not with money, not with points, not by asking nicely. Those slots are chosen by a person, and that person is not taking offers.
What are Pixels?
A currency you earn by publishing, posting and being useful. It buys cosmetic things — the bar under your name, the ring around your avatar, a title — and nothing else.
Pixels cannot be bought with money, at any price. They do not affect your ranking, your placement, your fees, or what anyone else sees of your work. If they ever could, they would stop being a record of what you did and start being a leaderboard for whoever spent most.
Can I use AI tools to make my game?
Yes. I do not rank tools, I do not have a preferred engine, and I do not treat generated work as lesser work.
What I ask is that you say so. A listing can declare whether generative AI contributed, and to what — art, audio, writing. Code is deliberately not one of the options: nobody means an autocomplete fixing a null check when they say "an AI game", and a category that lumps those together makes the whole declaration less worth reading.
Declaring is optional and it is not a warning label. It is there because players increasingly want to know, and because a creator who says nothing and a creator who says no should not look identical.
Where the line actually is — passing off somebody else's work as your own — is set out in the Terms, under Original work and the tools you use. It applies to every tool, including the ones that existed before this argument started.
Is my private work really private?
Your codex, your task lists and your unpublished drafts are visible to you and to nobody else — not to other members, not to staff. Every query that reads them filters on who is asking. Team boards are visible to that team.
Your profile and your wall each have their own setting: public, friends only, or private.
What happens to my data?
What I hold and why is set out on the Privacy page. What you can ask for, and how, is on the Your data page.
The site is new. What if it breaks?
It will, occasionally. The database is backed up nightly to separate storage, and the restore is tested rather than assumed — a backup nobody has ever restored is not a backup.
If something breaks for you, there is a feedback form and a bug report in Settings. Both reach a person.
What's coming?
Community backing for vetted projects, a free helper for the dull parts of publishing, proper search, and more of the codex. They are in the specs in that order, and what people actually use decides what moves.