Sell your game through the Vault
Your game gets its own store page on the right shelf, a Buy button, and it plays straight in the browser the moment someone buys it.
Retro Vault is a Steam-style library for the Philips Videopac G7000/G7400, Magnavox Odyssey², Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga and MS-DOS. New games for these machines are still being written — this is how we put them in front of the people already browsing the shelf.
The revenue is yours.
That is the whole point of this. Retro Vault is a preservation project, not a publisher taking a publisher's cut.
What you get
You set the price, and the income from your game goes to you. Retro Vault adds a small share on top of its running costs — payment processing, hosting, bandwidth and the licensing server that keeps the whole thing working. We haven't fixed that percentage yet, and whatever it turns out to be, you'll see the exact number in writing and agree to it before your game goes on sale. Nothing gets listed without your say-so.
Checkout runs through a payment provider that acts as merchant of record, so VAT, invoices and refunds are handled properly rather than by us improvising. What reaches you is your share of what the buyer paid, settled the way we agree up front.
- Non-exclusive. Keep selling on itch.io, keep pressing cartridges, keep your own shop. Listing here takes nothing away from you.
- You keep the copyright. You give us permission to sell it, nothing more. No transfer of rights, no exclusivity clause, no ownership of your work.
- You can pull it whenever you like. One email and the listing comes down. Buyers who already paid keep their copy.
- Free games stay free. The Vault already hosts dozens of free homebrews and PD releases at no cost to anyone. The store is only for the games you want to charge for.
From an email to a Buy button.
Four steps, and only the first one needs anything from you.
You get in touch
Tell us which game, which machine, and roughly what you think it should cost. A link to your itch.io page or a forum thread is usually enough to start.
We agree the terms
Price, the Vault's share, and how you want to be paid — written down and confirmed by you before anything is built. If it doesn't suit you, that's where it stops.
We build the page
Cover art, screenshots, description, your credits and links, the manual if you have one. We can work from whatever you already have. You see it and approve it first.
It goes on sale
Your game appears on its shelf next to the classics, with a Buy button. From then on it's listed, searchable, and part of the library.
We do the technical work — the store setup, the license handling, the per-buyer copy. There is nothing for you to build, install or maintain.
Buy it, get a key, play it.
No accounts, no launcher, no subscription. The friction between "I want this" and "I'm playing this" is about thirty seconds.
Buy on the game's page
The Buy button sits on your game's own page in the Vault, with the price and your name on it. Checkout is handled by the payment provider — card, VAT, receipt, done.
A license key by email
The key arrives by email and unlocks the game on the buyer's own machines — desktop, laptop, a second browser, the offline Vault included. No account to create, no password to forget, no personal data kept by us. Run out of slots after a new laptop or a wiped browser? Freeing one takes a click on the game's page, and we reset keys on request.
Plays in the browser
Press START and the game runs, emulator and all, in the same page. Nothing to install. That's how every other game in the Vault works too.
A copy to keep
Buyers can also download their own copy of the file and run it in the offline Vault or in whatever emulator they already use. What they bought is genuinely theirs.
Honest about what's possible.
Any file that can run in an emulator can be copied. Anyone who tells you their system makes a ROM uncopyable is selling something. What we can do is make casual sharing traceable and pointless — and that is what the Vault does:
- Every purchase gets its own license key, checked against our server before the game unlocks, and good for a handful of the buyer's own machines — generous enough that nobody honest ever notices it, tight enough that a key posted on a forum burns out fast.
- Every copy is stamped. Each buyer's file carries an invisible code tied to their order, hidden in space the game doesn't use. A copy that turns up on a ROM site can be traced straight back to the order it came from.
- The stamp doesn't touch the game. Same file size, same behaviour, same checksum-clean boot on real hardware. We test each stamped build before a game goes on sale.
- Nothing is hidden from you. If you want to know exactly how the licensing and stamping work before you agree to anything, ask and we'll walk you through it.
Formats we can handle: .bin and .crt for Videopac and
Odyssey², .prg, .crt and .d64 for the C64, .zip
for MS-DOS, and .adf for the Amiga. Amiga titles are sold as a download for now —
browser play for that shelf needs a file the emulator can reach directly, which the store copy
isn't. Everything else plays in the browser.
Not much.
The game
The final build, in one of the formats above. If you're still finishing it, talk to us anyway — we can have the page ready for the day you are.
Confirmation it's yours to sell
That you wrote it, or have the rights to it, and that no music, art or code in it belongs to somebody who'd object. A plain email saying so is enough.
A price
Yours to pick. If you'd like a steer on what comparable homebrew sells for on these machines, ask — we look at that sort of thing all day.
Whatever art you have
Cover, screenshots, a manual, a loading screen, a paragraph about how it came about. All optional. We'll make a proper page out of whatever exists.
The things people ask first.
Do I lose any rights by listing here?+
No. You give Retro Vault permission to sell the game; that's the extent of it. The copyright stays yours, the arrangement is non-exclusive, and you can end it whenever you want.
Can I keep selling it elsewhere?+
Yes — itch.io, your own site, a physical cartridge or disk release, a publisher's boxed edition. None of that conflicts with a listing here.
What does it cost me to be listed?+
Nothing up front. There's no listing fee, no hosting charge and no minimum. The only money that changes hands is the share of a sale, agreed with you before your game goes live.
Which machines are you taking games for?+
Philips Videopac G7000 and G7400, Magnavox Odyssey², Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga and MS-DOS. If you've written something for a machine that isn't on that list, write anyway — the shelf count has gone up before.
My game is free. Can it still be in the Vault?+
Yes, and it costs you nothing. The Vault already hosts a shelf of free homebrew and public-domain releases with a download button and a link back to you. Ask and we'll add it — that's a different conversation from this page, and an easier one.
Can I change the price later, or take the game down?+
Both, any time, by email. Buyers who already paid keep their copy and their key — pulling a listing stops new sales, it doesn't reach back into anyone's library.
Who actually runs this?+
One person and a lot of evenings. Retro Vault is a non-commercial preservation project that grew a store because homebrew authors deserve a shopfront next to the games they grew up on. You'll be dealing with a human, not a submissions portal.
Tell us about your game.
Which machine, what it's called, what it should cost, and a link if there is one. We read everything and answer properly — including if the answer is that it isn't a fit.
hq [at] retrovault.world
Not selling anything, but want your free homebrew on the shelf, or spotted something wrong on a page about your game? Same address — that gets answered too.