LÖVE

I wrote a blog post on how to make an auto-updater for your LÖVE game. I thought this was really cool and easy so I thought I'd share it here https://github.com/adonaac/blog/issues/6

Very cool, and surprisingly straightforward. Way easier than messing with io or whatever the other methods are. Kind of surprising no one's thought of it before.

Concerned Joe did it already. There's two .love files that get run. The first one is a launcher with news and an updater that checks for new versions, then downloads it and runs the new version of the game. Quite genius actually.

With the popularity of Minecraft, people are now fairly accustomed to the idea of launching a news/updater first, where you can log in, update the client etc.

I think it's important to think about if this is really necessary for your game, however. For multiplayer games, it's essential, since things can go very wrong if people are using different versions of the game. For single-player games, it really depends on how much you're planning to update. For most single-player games, most players will likely expect to be able to jump straight in.

Thanks for writing this, it's pretty easy to get a grasp of.

This is a cool feature and a definite must when you distribute your game as a standalone.

Kind of surprising no one's thought of it before

A few people have previously done things like this with Love and I have tried similar techniques using Lua.
Unfortunately an auto-update service is not trivial to scale/maintain if you have a massively popular game.
Still, an auto-updater would work well for small freeware or free-to-play games.