Any portal with a thousand-plus games has done one of two things: curated them, or scraped whatever was available and let the grid sort it out. Both are legitimate businesses. They produce very different catalogues, and you deserve to know which one you are browsing.
We curate, imperfectly, against a checklist. Here it is.
Why a checklist at all
Because taste does not scale and memory is unreliable. With a catalogue this size, "we only add good games" is not a policy, it is a feeling — and feelings drift, especially when a game looks like it might do numbers.
A written checklist has one useful property: it produces decisions you can be held to later. When we turn down a game that would probably have been popular, the checklist is the reason, and we can point at it.
What gets in
It runs in a browser with no install and no account. This is the only truly non-negotiable item. HTML5, WebGL, Unity Web, Godot Web, or a Flash-era game we can run through a modern emulator.
It loads reliably. Not just once, on our connection. A game that works intermittently is worse than a game that is missing, because it wastes the player's time and teaches them not to trust the site.
We can describe it honestly. Every game gets a page with real text about what it is and how it plays. If we cannot work out what a game is after playing it, we cannot write that page, and it does not go up.
It runs on modest hardware. Not a hard rule, but a strong preference — a large share of our players are on Chromebooks and older laptops, as we covered in games that run on any computer.
What gets refused
Paid games republished for free. If a game is sold on Steam or a console store, we do not host a free copy of it. This one costs us traffic regularly, because pirated versions of well-known titles are exactly what people search for.
Aggressive trademark use. A game using a major publisher's characters, logos or exact title to pass itself off as official is out. Not because we admire large publishers, but because the developer who made it will lose it anyway, and we would rather not send you to something that disappears.
Games we cannot make load properly. Sometimes a game is fine and the embed is not — the host blocks framing, or breaks outside its own domain. If we cannot serve it reliably, it does not go in the catalogue.
Anything requiring an install or a download. The whole promise of the site is that clicking is enough. A game that asks for anything else breaks it.
The awkward one: fan games and clones
This is where the checklist earns its keep, because the honest answer is "it depends" and that is exactly the kind of answer that drifts without rules.
A large part of browser gaming is fan work — reimplementations, tributes, parodies and unofficial sequels. Some of it is genuinely better than what it imitates. The single most played game on our entire portal is a fan-made take on a commercial series, and we have said so plainly in our guide to its versions.
So the line we draw is not "fan game or not". It is whether it pretends to be the original. A fan game with its own name, its own art and its own ideas is a creative work in a long tradition. A copy using the original's exact title and assets to collect its search traffic is something else, and we do not host it.
We also say which is which on the page. A player looking for the official game should not discover halfway through that this is not it.
How we test that a game actually runs
This part is more technical than most people expect, and it is where the majority of rejections actually happen.
The naive check is to request the game's URL and look at the response code. That check is nearly worthless. A game will return a perfectly healthy response and then refuse to render inside a frame, or load a blank page, or silently redirect to its own homepage once it notices it is not on its own domain.
So we load games in a real browser and look at what appears on screen. It catches the failures headers never will: frames that come back zero pixels tall, games that need a wider viewport than they declare, and hosts that quietly swap in their own site.
It is slower than a script and it is the reason the catalogue does not have a long tail of games that look present and are not.
What gets removed later
Getting in is not permanent. Three things take a game back out.
The rights holder asks. Immediately, unconditionally, no justification required. If you made a game we are hosting and you want it gone, email us — you do not need to explain yourself or send anything formal, though our DMCA page exists if you prefer a paper trail.
It stops loading. Third-party games go away without warning when their host changes something. We find those and remove or replace them.
Nobody plays it. We measure every session, so we can see when a game has been in the catalogue for months, has been recommended, and has been opened by almost nobody. Those get demoted rather than deleted — a game with no audience is not necessarily a bad game, and we would rather it stay findable than vanish.
You made a game and want it here?
Everything above is the same checklist we apply to submissions. If you are a solo developer, an indie studio or an established team, the process and the criteria are set out on our page for studios — including what we do for a game once it is in.
Frequently asked questions
Do you accept every game submitted to you?
No. The hard filters are legal and technical: it must be playable in a browser with no install, and it must not infringe someone else's rights. Beyond that we turn down games that will not load reliably or that we cannot describe honestly to a player.
Do developers pay to be listed?
No. Getting into the catalogue costs nothing and is not for sale. Paid promotion exists as a separate thing — featuring, a video, an article — but it never buys a place in the catalogue or a better review.
Do games with in-app purchases get refused?
No. Optional purchases are a normal way for a developer to make a living, and we do not treat them as a reason to reject a game. We do mention it in the write-up when a game pushes them harder than we think is reasonable.
Do you remove games?
Yes, for three reasons: a rights holder asks, the game stops loading, or nobody plays it and it clutters the catalogue. The first happens fastest and needs no justification from the person asking.
How do you know a game works before publishing it?
We load it in a real browser and look at the result, rather than trusting the response headers. Plenty of games return a perfectly healthy 200 and then refuse to render inside a frame — the only way to catch that is to look.