Most portals make a developer guess. You upload through a form, the game appears in a grid, and nothing tells you what happened next. We would rather write down how this works so you can decide whether it is worth your time before you spend any.
Who this is for
We work with solo developers, indie studios and established teams, and the process is the same for all three. In practice the games we publish come from four places: people finishing their first jam project, small studios with a commercial title that needs reach, teams porting an existing game to the web, and developers who want a prototype played by real people before committing another six months to it.
That last category is worth calling out. If what you need is a few hundred strangers touching your build and a report on where they stopped playing, say so — it is a different conversation from a launch, and a more useful one at that stage.
What your build has to do
One hard requirement: it runs in a browser, with no install and no account. HTML5, WebGL, Unity Web, Godot Web — all fine.
Everything else is a preference rather than a rule, but these are the ones that decide whether a game does well once it is up:
- It starts fast. Load time is the single strongest predictor of whether a browser player stays. A game that is playable in four seconds beats a better-looking one that takes thirty, and it is not close.
- It runs on weak hardware. A large share of our audience is on school Chromebooks and five-year-old laptops. If your build needs a discrete GPU, it will look great and be played by nobody.
- It works on touch, or says it does not. Mobile support is not required. Claiming it and not having it is worse than not having it, because the player leaves annoyed.
- The first thirty seconds explain themselves. Nobody reads a tutorial in a tab they opened on impulse.
If you are unsure whether your build clears the bar, send it anyway. We test it and tell you what we saw — including when the answer is no.
The process, step by step
1. You send a link. Through the studios contact form or by email. A playable URL, the studio name and a sentence about the game is genuinely enough to start.
2. We play it. On a real browser, on mid-range hardware, the way a visitor would. We are checking that it loads, that it is comprehensible, and that nothing breaks in an iframe — the third one catches more games than you would expect.
3. We come back to you. Either with a yes and what we propose, or with a no and the reason. If something technical is blocking it, we tell you what and where so you can fix it and come back.
4. We build the page and publish. Described below.
5. We share what we see. Once the game has enough sessions to mean something, you get the numbers.
What we build around your game
This is the part that differs most from other portals, so it is worth being specific.
A game on LemonArcade gets a page of roughly 1,500 words of original text, ten unique FAQ entries, documented controls, device support and structured data — written in English, French and Spanish, with proper hreflang between the three. It is not a description scraped from your store listing.
The reason is not generosity, it is arithmetic. A thumbnail in a grid gets traffic on the day it is featured and nothing afterwards. A page with real content keeps arriving in search results months later, and that long tail is where most of the plays actually come from.
Your game also enters our internal recommendation mesh, which links games to each other by genuine relevance rather than by upload date. Players who like something adjacent to your game will be shown it, repeatedly, without you doing anything.
Rights, revenue and taking it down
We are going to be blunt here because vagueness in this section is how developers get burned.
You keep everything. Publishing with us transfers no rights in your game, your art or your name. We are not exclusive and never ask to be.
Take-downs are unconditional. Ask and it comes down, no justification needed and no notice period. If you would rather use a formal channel, our DMCA page exists for that.
Ads. Our pages carry advertising, and games from distribution partners carry whatever their own SDK serves. If your build has its own monetisation, it keeps running as-is. If revenue share matters to your situation, raise it in the first message and we will be specific rather than hand-wavy.
What to send us
The contact form asks for the essentials, but if you want to make the first reply useful rather than a list of questions, include:
- A playable link — not a video, not a store page
- Whether it works on touch
- Roughly what it weighs and how long a cold load takes
- Anything already published about it — a devlog, a jam page, a press kit
- What you actually want: reach, revenue, playtesting, or a specific promotion
That last point matters more than the rest. A developer who says "I want to know if the second level is too hard" gets a far more useful answer than one who says "please feature my game".
Frequently asked questions
Does it cost anything to publish a game?
Getting a game listed costs nothing. The promotion options — featuring, a TikTok short, a dedicated article — are a separate conversation, and we will tell you plainly what is free and what is not before anything happens.
Do I need to integrate an SDK?
No. We can list a game from a playable link alone. If your build already uses an ad or IAP SDK from a distribution partner, that keeps working — we do not strip or replace it.
Do you take exclusivity?
No. Publishing with us does not stop you publishing anywhere else, and it never will. We would rather your game does well in five places than adequately in one.
How long does it take to go live?
Once we have agreed to publish, building the page takes the longest — around 1,500 words in three languages plus the FAQ set. Expect days rather than weeks.
Can I have my game removed later?
Yes, at any time and without justification. Email us and it comes down. We also handle formal requests through our DMCA page if you prefer a paper trail.