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[mcoorlim]

What's the best option for sharing game builds semi-exclusively? Say as an incentive for joining my mailing list, but not something I want on my itch.io page, or only for my supporters on Patreon. Google drive link? Dropbox? Torrent?

[RudyTheDev]

Distributing files on stuff like Dropbox or Drive is against their TOS. Torrents and other P2P are blocked in many places and require additional software. Most file sharing sites are ad-ridden horrors and throttle speeds, plus have download limits. Custom hosting will quickly run out of bandwidth or be expensive. Custom server rent is even more expensive. Having own server requires maintenance and running them all day and is likely against many ISP TOA.

So, really, you gotta choose your poison. Most people choose a reasonable file sharing site, like Mega. Smaller ones get away with Google Drive.

[ThemsAllTook]

Custom hosting will quickly run out of bandwidth or be expensive.

Probably not for the small amount of downloads in the use case described in the first post, unless your game is huge or your patrons/mailing list members are very numerous. I'm partial to Linode, though a lot of people I know prefer Digital Ocean. From what I understand, Digital Ocean charges you only for the bandwidth you actually use, so it's likely to end up being cheaper overall if price is an issue.

[miki]

Which size range do you expect your game builds to be in?

[RealScaniX]

I think itch.io has patreon support. I haven't used it, but visited some links from patreon pages to patreon only itch.io pages.

[ProgramGamer]

Yep, itch.io has Patreon integration, so you can manage game builds that way if you want. Otherwise, like it was said before, you'll have to use a hosting site or come up with a custom solution.

[mcoorlim]

These are mailing list incentives, not patreon rewards, so that's not really an option. In terms of size? So far it's been ~50 mb per file, but this might increase depending.

[miki]

I am just trying to cover all possibilities here (so likely this is not even an issue in your case) - For a file of this size, if your audience is worldwide and some of them are using dialup, download times for a 50Mb will be 2 hours. I only asked about file size since downloading for 2 hours in one go might be alleviated by using a solution that enables download pausing and resuming over multiple sessions (like for example Dropbox offline sync does).
I do not have a correct answer here, just a suggestion - if your programming environment permits, possibly you can add libcurl library to your project and integrate the download part into your game executable itself? (programming this would probably take a day or few of your time but would be something you could re-use in all your projects & it would permit you to store your executable online using a much larger choice of websites).
Or, if you do not feel like adding anything to your project, command line utilities exist both for curl and wget - possibly you could also use a command line (a batch file).
Anyway, just a thought.