What dubbing games actually cost

Nobody has written this down, and the spread is wide enough to be worth the page. The same activity — you, a microphone, a video, some friends — is free in one place, five dollars once in another, and a monthly subscription with a credit balance in a third. None of those is the wrong way to charge for it — they are just very different bargains, and which one suits you depends mostly on how often you play. Here is all of it, with the date it was checked, because prices in this corner move.

The prices, August 2026

Read off each site in August 2026. The three marked unofficial are not run by The Choicer Voicer's developer, who has said in a devlog that the itch.io store page and the Neocities site linked from it are the only ones they control. That is a note about who to ask when something breaks, not a verdict on the sites — two of them say the same thing about themselves on their own front pages.

The ones you buy once

What The Dub?! and RiffTrax: The Game are the polished end: supplied public-domain B-movies, a room-code lobby, and a price on Steam or a console store. You buy them and you own them, and for a group that plays occasionally that is often the cheapest thing on this page over a year.

The Choicer Voicer is the other one-off, and the cheapest: pay what you want above a $5 minimum on itch.io, for Windows and Linux. Its developer also publishes a free demo with no gameplay in it, purely so you can confirm your microphone works before buying rather than asking for a refund after. That is a considerate thing to ship and worth knowing about.

The genuinely free ones

Two of them, and the word is doing real work here: free with nothing selling you on the way past. Voxalike is free in a browser, plays from its own Workshop of community packs, and carries no advertising. PartyDub — ours, so weigh it accordingly — has a free tier that is a real game rather than a trial: play as much as you like, the full pack editor, the public scene library, your own clips marked by hand, rooms of two, clips up to five minutes, and a watermarked download at the end. Supporting it is $5 a month or $25 once and adds rooms of ten, ten-minute clips, automatic line-marking, pack export and no watermark. Joining somebody else's room has never cost anything. There are also no ads on any page of it, and no analytics, tag manager or tracking pixel either — which is easy to say and easy to check, so check it.

The ones that are free because of ads

Free is not one thing, and the price table above only tells half the story. Advertising is a normal and legitimate way to fund a site that costs money to run, and nobody should be sniffy about it — but it is a cost you pay in attention rather than in money, and it belongs in a comparison of what things cost.

So, read off each site in August 2026: thechoicervoicer.app runs Ezoic, a full advertising platform, alongside a consent prompt and an ad-identity service. choicervoicer.org runs three separate ad networks plus Yandex and Google analytics, and rewrites its own browser-tab title to read "(1) New Message!" while you are on it. Its navigation also leads out to unblocked-games, io-games and horror-games sections, which tells you what kind of site it is underneath the Choicer Voicer page.

The one that surprised us is choicervoicer.games: its public pages carry Google AdSense and a session-recording script, and it is also the site selling $12.99-to-$49.99 monthly plans. We could not check whether subscribers still see the ads, so treat that as a question to ask rather than a fact — but it is worth asking before subscribing.

For what it is worth from the other side of the fence: PartyDub carries no advertising and no analytics of any kind. Not a compromise we agonised over — a game where the whole pitch is that your video never leaves your device would look ridiculous with a tracking pixel on the page.

The credit subscriptions

Worth slowing down for, because it is the model where the monthly cost is least obvious from the monthly price. One site, choicervoicer.games, sells three monthly plans — $12.99, $24.99 and $49.99, with annual rates a little lower — and each comes with a credit balance rather than unlimited use. Credits are spent when you upload a video, and on the monthly plans they expire after thirty days. Top-ups run $9.99 for forty credits to $39.99 for three hundred and twenty, valid a year.

Credits are a fair way to sell this, and worth understanding rather than being suspicious of. Anything that processes video costs real money to run — ours does too, which is exactly why our own scans come as a monthly allowance rather than unlimited. The thing to work out before subscribing is your own usage, because when a balance expires the plan price and what a month actually costs you are two different numbers. Count the clips you would really dub in an evening, then pick the tier that covers it.

The other limits there, worth checking against how you play: uploads capped at one minute and 95 MB, five players to a room, and finished results kept for twenty-four hours on the free path or thirty days on the paid one.

Credit where it is due on one point: thechoicervoicer.app states plainly that it is "not affiliated with or endorsed by The Choicer Voicer on itch.io or its creator, YeahMaybe", and choicervoicer.org calls itself "an independent fan-made information page". Saying so costs them traffic and they say it anyway. choicervoicer.games carries no equivalent note, which is worth knowing before you enter a card rather than after.

What the money is actually for

In every one of these, the part that costs the operator money is the same: analysing audio to work out where the lines are, and pulling a clean backing track out of a mixed one. That is real computation on somebody's bill, which is why almost nothing in this genre offers it without limit, and why the games that supply their own prepared scenes can charge once and be done — the work was finished before you arrived.

So the useful way to compare is not by the headline price but by what a normal evening costs. A pack-based game: nothing after the purchase. A game that takes your own video: something every time, whatever shape the pricing is poured into.

The short version

• —Cheapest way to own one outright: The Choicer Voicer, $5 on itch.io — but it is local-only and Windows or Linux.
• —Free forever, no card, no ads, prepared scenes: Voxalike.
• —Free forever, no card, no ads, your own clips: PartyDub's free tier.
• —Polished and supplied, bought once: What The Dub?! or RiffTrax: The Game.
• —Before any subscription: check whether the credits expire, whether the site still shows ads once you have paid, and who runs it — it is usually stated on the page, and it decides who you go to when something breaks.

If a price here has moved, tell us and it gets fixed. A table with a date on it is only worth anything if somebody maintains it.