Where to Publish HTML5 Games

Ad-Supported Game Portals

Ad-supported portals host your game, drive traffic through their own marketing and SEO, and share advertising revenue with you. These are the easiest path to getting your game in front of a large audience because the portal handles player acquisition entirely. You upload your game, integrate their SDK, and receive a percentage of the ad revenue generated by players on your game page.

CrazyGames is the dominant player in this space, reaching over 20 million unique players each month. Their developer portal accepts games built with virtually any web game framework, including Unity WebGL exports, Godot HTML5, Phaser, Construct, and GameMaker. The submission process starts with a Basic Launch phase where the game is tested with limited traffic for approximately two weeks. If the game meets engagement benchmarks during that trial period, it is promoted to Full Launch, which requires complete SDK integration for ads, analytics, cloud saves, and user authentication. Revenue sharing on CrazyGames varies based on game performance, with top-performing titles earning between 50 and 70 percent of ad revenue. Technical requirements for Basic Launch include a maximum initial download size of 50 MB and a file count under 1,500.

Poki is another major portal with strong organic search traffic, particularly in European markets. Poki takes a more curated approach than CrazyGames, reviewing each submission for quality, originality, and mobile responsiveness before listing it. Games that perform well on mobile browsers tend to do especially well on Poki because a significant portion of their audience plays on phones and tablets. Their SDK integration focuses on ad placement timing, ensuring ads appear at natural break points in gameplay rather than interrupting active play. Poki also provides detailed analytics dashboards that show retention curves, session lengths, and geographic distribution, which are valuable for understanding how players interact with your game across different markets.

GameDistribution operates differently from single-site portals. Instead of hosting your game on one website, GameDistribution syndicates it across a network of hundreds of smaller game sites and publisher websites. This gives broad reach across many domains, but each individual site may contribute relatively little traffic. The advantage is scale. A game distributed across 400 sites that each send 50 daily plays generates 20,000 plays per day from the network as a whole. GameDistribution provides an HTML5 SDK that handles ad loading, event tracking, and cross-site analytics, giving you a unified view of performance across the entire network.

Newgrounds occupies a distinct niche as a community-driven platform that prioritizes creative expression over commercial metrics. The audience on Newgrounds values artistic ambition, experimental gameplay, and distinctive visual styles. Revenue comes from a supporter system rather than forced ad integration, which means your game can run without any ads at all if you prefer. For experimental or mature-themed games that might not meet the content policies of mainstream portals, Newgrounds is often the ideal home.

Indie Marketplaces

Indie marketplaces differ from portals in that they give developers direct control over pricing, page design, and player communication. The marketplace provides the platform infrastructure and some discoverability, but the developer retains far more autonomy over how their game is presented and monetized.

itch.io is the premier indie game marketplace and one of the most important platforms for web game developers specifically. Unlike most other marketplaces, itch.io lets you upload HTML5 games that play directly in the browser on your itch.io game page. Players can try your game without any download, which makes the friction-to-play nearly zero. You set your own price, choose whether the game is free, paid, or pay-what-you-want, and customize your game page with screenshots, descriptions, devlogs, and community features. The platform also supports downloadable builds alongside the browser version, so you can offer both play-in-browser and downloadable options on the same page.

itch.io takes a revenue cut that defaults to 10 percent but can be adjusted by the developer, including down to zero percent. This flexibility, combined with the platform's strong indie community and active game jam culture, makes it the go-to choice for web games that are artistic, experimental, or targeted at a niche audience. itch.io hosts dozens of game jams every month with thousands of participants, and submitting to jams is one of the most effective ways to get initial visibility for a new game. The jam community actively plays and rates submissions, providing both feedback and an early player base.

Game Jolt is another indie platform that supports HTML5 browser games with community features, achievements, trophies, and a scoring API. While smaller than itch.io, Game Jolt has an active community, particularly for retro-styled and pixel art games. Their API allows you to integrate platform features like scoreboards and achievements directly into your web game, which can boost engagement and give players reasons to return. Game Jolt also supports devlogs and community posts, letting you build a following around your development process.

Self-Hosting on Your Own Domain

Self-hosting means serving your game from a domain you own and control. The technical barrier is low because a web game is just a set of static files that any web server or cloud storage bucket can serve. The real challenge is promotion, since you start with zero organic traffic and have to build an audience through SEO, social media, community engagement, and cross-promotion with other developers.

The advantage of self-hosting grows over time. Every player who visits your domain contributes to its search engine authority. Every game you add to the domain creates more internal links and more pages for search engines to index. After a year or two of consistent publishing, a self-hosted game site can generate substantial organic search traffic without any ongoing promotion cost, because the domain has established itself as a relevant source for browser game content. This compounding effect is the single strongest argument for maintaining a presence on your own domain, even if you also publish on portals.

Self-hosting also gives you complete freedom in monetization. You can use Google AdSense for display ads around the game, integrate rewarded video ads through networks like Google Ad Manager, implement in-game purchases through Stripe or PayPal, or keep the game completely free as a portfolio piece. No revenue share goes to a platform, and you are not subject to any portal's terms of service or content policies beyond basic legal requirements. You control the player experience from the moment they arrive on your site to the moment they leave.

The hosting cost itself is minimal. A static site on Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, or a basic S3-plus-CloudFront setup costs somewhere between zero and five dollars per month for typical traffic volumes. SSL certificates, CDN distribution, and automatic deployment are included in most static hosting services at no additional cost. The only meaningful ongoing expense is the domain registration, which runs about ten to fifteen dollars per year.

Distribution Networks and Aggregators

Beyond individual portals and marketplaces, several distribution networks aggregate web games and distribute them across partner sites. These networks act as intermediaries between developers and the many small game sites that lack the resources to source games directly.

Famobi is a premium distribution network that accepts high-quality HTML5 games and distributes them to telecom operators, media companies, and messaging platforms. Their standards are higher than general-purpose portals, but the distribution reach extends into channels that individual developers would never access on their own, such as carrier-branded game sections on mobile portals in emerging markets. Famobi also offers upfront licensing deals for top-tier games, which can provide a guaranteed payment regardless of play volume.

SoftGames focuses on instant games for messaging platforms and mobile browsers, distributing HTML5 games through partnerships with Snapchat, Samsung, and various telecom providers. Their SDK handles ad integration and platform-specific features, and the revenue model is based on ad revenue sharing. The audience reached through these partnerships tends to be more casual than portal audiences, favoring simple, immediately understandable game mechanics.

Choosing the Right Combination

The most effective publishing strategy uses multiple platforms simultaneously. Start with itch.io for community building and early feedback, submit to one or two major portals (CrazyGames and Poki are the strongest choices) for ad revenue and broad reach, and maintain a polished version on your own domain for long-term brand building and full monetization control.

Consider the nature of your game when prioritizing platforms. Casual, mobile-friendly games with short play sessions perform best on ad-supported portals where the audience expects quick-play experiences. Story-driven, artistic, or experimental games find their most appreciative audience on itch.io and Newgrounds. Multiplayer games benefit from the established player bases on major portals, while single-player games with strong replayability do well on self-hosted domains where SEO can drive a steady stream of new players over months and years.

Non-exclusive publishing is the default arrangement on almost every platform. None of the major portals or marketplaces require exclusivity for standard submissions, which means there is no contractual barrier to publishing the same game in five different places. The only overhead is adapting to each platform's SDK requirements, which is typically a few hours of integration work per platform.