Launch and Hosting

What launching does#

Launching is the first promotion of a game. Until then the game is in the Development state: it has builds, the editor can play-test it, but players cannot find or join it. Launching picks one build, fills in the public listing, chooses where the server runs, and starts it. When it finishes:

• The game's state becomes Live and the selected build becomes version v1.
• The listing is published and, unless you had set it to unlisted, its visibility becomes public, so it appears in the launcher's Discover page once the server is up.
• The Production tab appears on the game page, with the server address, player count, logs and hosting controls.
• Every later release is a hotfix or update pushed from the Update tab — you never launch twice. See Updates, Patches and Rollback.

Launching happens on the Creator Dashboard, not in the editor, and only the game's owner can do it. The editor's part is pushing the build; see Push a Build from the Editor.

Before you launch#

1. Push a build and confirm it shows as Ready (or Beta) on the game's Update tab. See Builds and Versions.
2. Test it. Play it with Play Local from the editor, or run it as a beta so other people can try it.
3. Prepare your listing. The wizard asks for title, description and tags, but icon, cover art and screenshots are uploaded from the game's settings. See Game Details and Branding.
4. Decide on hosting. Free community hosting needs no payment. A paid tier needs a card at checkout. Compare them in Hosting tiers below.

The Launch wizard#

Open the wizard from the game page: while a game is in Development its header shows a Launch Game button. You can also go to the Update tab, leave Destination on Live server, select a build, and click Launch to Production — that opens the wizard with the build pre-selected.

The page is titled Launch Your Game and has six steps shown as a progress bar: Build, Details, Content, Hosting, Schedule, Confirm. The forward button (Continue, or Review on the Schedule step) is disabled until the current step is valid; Back returns to the previous one. Your answers are saved as a draft as you move between steps (the footer shows draft saved), so you can close the page and resume later.

Step 1 — Build#

Select a Build to Launch lists the builds that can go live: those with the Ready badge and a build currently on Beta. Builds still uploading, archived, or failed are not offered. If the list is empty the page says "No ready builds. Push a build from the editor first."

Step 2 — Details#

Game Details is how the game appears in the launcher. Everything here can be changed after launch.

Step 3 — Content#

Content & Monetization sets the rating and how you earn from the game:

• Content Rating: Everyone (Ages 6+), Teen (Ages 13+) or Mature (Ages 18+).
• Monetization: Free (free to play), In-App Purchases (free + store) or Paid Access (one-time price). Choosing Paid Access reveals a Price (USD) field, prefilled with 4.99; the price must be greater than zero.
• Two confirmations, both required: "I confirm I own or have rights to all content in this game." and "I agree to the Vastopia Creator Terms."

Step 4 — Hosting#

Server Hosting is where you pick where the game runs. The page explains the split: free runs on the shared community server; paid tiers get a dedicated server in the region you choose.

• Hosting Plan lists Free — Community Hosting at $0/mo first, then each paid tier with its monthly price, vCPU and RAM, an approximate player capacity bar, and a one-line "Best for" description.
• Region and the Annual billing toggle sit above the plan list. They are shown until you pick Free — Community Hosting, which hides both; choosing a paid tier brings them back. Annual billing shows ~17% savings and changes every price on the page to its annual-equivalent monthly figure.

You can proceed with the free plan and no region, or with a paid tier plus a region.

Step 5 — Schedule#

When should your game go live? offers two options:

• Launch Now — the server starts as soon as payment is confirmed (immediately for the free plan).
• Schedule Launch — pick a Date and Time (local) at least 5 minutes in the future; the page previews "Goes live: …" in your local time. Your card is charged at checkout so billing is active on launch day, and a Coming Soon page with a countdown goes up at /explore/<gameId> where players can wishlist the game.

Step 6 — Confirm#

Review & Launch summarizes the game, build, rating, monetization, region, hosting plan, billing cadence and launch time, with the cost line at the bottom: $0 — no payment for the free plan, otherwise the monthly price (labelled First charge today for a scheduled launch).

• For the free plan, click Launch Free. The game deploys to the community server and the page switches to the progress view.
• For a paid tier, click Proceed to Checkout — $X/mo. You are sent to Stripe's hosted payment page and returned to the wizard when done. If you abandon checkout, the wizard shows "Checkout was canceled. Your launch isn't set up yet — pick up where you left off below." and nothing is charged or started.

While the server comes up#

After Launch Free, or after returning from Stripe, the page shows Launching Your Game with five stages, an elapsed timer, and the tier and region:

The page says "This usually takes 1-3 minutes." and polls every few seconds. Once the server is up it shows your game's name followed by is Live!, with the Server address (host:port), Tier, Region and Droplet (the server's id), plus Open Production Dashboard and View Store Listing buttons. Players can now find the game in the launcher.

If it runs past six minutes the page warns "This is taking longer than expected." and keeps watching; provisioning can still complete. If it reports Launch Failed, your payment was received and the subscription is active, but the server did not come up — go to the game page and use Reset to Development on the Production tab to clear the failed launch and run the wizard again. See Billing and Lifecycle.

For a scheduled launch you instead see Launch Scheduled with the date, a reminder that the Coming Soon page is live, and a Cancel Launch button. Cancelling asks you to type the game's name; it cancels the subscription with a pro-rata refund and leaves the game in Development. The platform checks for due launches every minute; if the scheduled build is no longer Ready or Beta at that moment (for example you deleted it), the schedule is cleared and nothing launches, so leave the chosen build alone until launch day.

Hosting tiers#

Prices are in USD. Annual billing prepays ten months for the year (two months free); the table shows the equivalent monthly figure the wizard displays when Annual billing is on.

The player figure is the concurrent cap the server enforces for that tier; launching sets the game's maximum players to it. You can move between paid tiers and regions later: the Game Details tab's Hosting & Billing card has a Change Tier / Region button that opens the Change Hosting Plan page, at the cost of a few minutes of downtime while the server restarts. See Billing and Lifecycle.

Regions#

Paid tiers run in one of these regions, listed as the wizard names them. Pick the one closest to most of your players.

Free community hosting#

Free — Community Hosting runs your game server as a container on a server shared with other community games. It is real, public hosting — players find and join the game exactly as they would a paid one — with these differences:

• No payment and no region choice. The wizard skips the region grid and billing toggle, and the Production tab shows no billing status.
• 20 concurrent players. When the game is regularly hitting that cap, upgrade to a paid tier.
• One free live game per account. Launching a second game on the free plan is refused with "You already have a free Community-hosted game live. Additional games need a paid tier." Your existing free game is never taken down by this rule.
• Idle games hibernate. A community server with no player activity for 72 hours is stopped, with its saves kept. The next player who joins wakes it: the launcher shows Waking up server… while the server is redeployed, which takes longer than a normal join.
• Stop and restart is free. Stop Production and Bring Online on the Production tab work for community-hosted games too.

What happens on the platform#

For a paid tier, a launch creates a dedicated cloud server for your game alone, sized by tier and placed in your region. On first boot it installs the container runtime and Vastopia's deploy agent, which then downloads the build's server_data.zip, starts the game server container pinned to the platform's current engine release, and opens the game port. The same agent is what later hotfixes, updates, rollbacks and plan changes talk to. Community hosting skips the machine creation and starts the container on an existing shared host instead.

Players never receive a build directly from your server. The launcher reads the game's live status, downloads the live build's content from the platform CDN, and connects to the host:port shown on the Production tab.

With AI (MCP)#

There is no MCP tool for the Launch wizard; the first go-live, hosting choice and payment happen on the dashboard. Around it, get_live_status reports whether anything is deployed (and the host, port and live build when it is), get_deploy_status and wait_for_deploy follow a deploy the platform is running, and read_server_logs with mode:"live" reads the production server's output once the game is up. After the launch, promote_build handles hotfixes and updates.