For time-pressed people, visiting a website – whether it’s on a PC or mobile phone – is fast and easy. — Pixabay
Video-game players are returning to an old technology to get their dopamine fix: websites.
While much of the US$189bil video-game industry is stagnant or shrinking, the appetite for web-based games like GeoGuessr and chess is soaring. Sales for such titles – advertising and the sums players spend for in-game items, were expected to triple from 2021 to 2028, reaching US$3.09bil, according to data from Google and Kantar, a market researcher.
The reason is simple: For time-pressed people, visiting a website – whether it’s on a PC or mobile phone – is fast and easy. No one has to boot up a console or download an app, and games can be picked up at any time, at home or between work shifts. Game creators get to keep more of their proceeds by cutting out revenue-skimming app-store owners and can attract their own advertisers.
"Newcomers are coming to the web,” said Dmitry Kachmar, founder of the web-games company Playgama, an online mall for browser titles that’s based in Dubai. Developers "don’t need publishers. It’s easier to get traffic,” he said.
Web games’ easy accessibility partly explains the success of intergenerational hits like the New York Times’ Wordle, which was originally posted on its own website. Microsoft Corp’s LinkedIn and Reddit Inc have followed suit with trivia and puzzle games like Sudoku.
It takes only a few seconds to drop into Vortella’s Dress Up, a game on the Poki BV service that has been attracting 16 million plays a month and 460,000 daily active users, according to an online posting by one of the developers.
Early in the 2000s, developers were happy to share simple games featuring stick-figure protagonists and poorly animated cars straight to websites. These titles, made using Adobe Flash, were accessible to anyone who could type an address in a browser.
Over the years, Flash was replaced by better technologies. Popular web games like Zynga’s FarmVille transitioned to smartphone apps. Gamers who developed an appetite for sleek, detailed graphics purchased consoles.
"Developers followed the money, and players followed the quality,” said Chris Hewish, president of Xsolla, which processes consumers’ payments for game companies.
Today, players want to get to their games as cheaply and quickly as possible. Consoles cost more than US$450. Players in the US$103bil smartphone game market are experiencing "app fatigue”, downloading less and less, according to data from Sensor Tower, an industry researcher.
That’s why some game makers are going back to the basics and making titles for the open internet again. Electronic Arts Inc founder Trip Hawkins recently predicted web games will be "one of the next waves.”
"I’m encouraged by the landscape of web games,” Matthew Bromberg, chief executive officer of Unity Software Inc, said in an interview. Unity’s software powers more than half of today’s web games, he said.
According to a report from Playgama, an estimated 15,000 games launched in 2025 that use HTML5, the most popular underlying web game technology. That’s 2.7 times more than a year ago.
"It’s an exciting new platform that’s open, which is really good for developers and consumers,” Bromberg said.
One reason for the shift is the hurdles posed by platform gatekeepers and fees taken by software distributors. Steam, a storefront for PC games, and Apple take 30% of most dollars spent on their platforms. After recent regulatory action forced open the mobile-gaming market, developers are looking for ways to earn money without paying such fees.
"Policy changes in regions such as the European Union have reduced reliance on app stores and opened up direct access to users through web apps,” Xsolla’s Hewish said. "At the same time, rising user acquisition costs and persistent store fees have encouraged developers to look for alternative, higher-margin channels.”
Web-game companies are beefing up. Amsterdam-based Poki, the host of Vortella’s Dress Up and a top web-game company, has more than doubled its employee count to 70 since 2020, while revenue has grown by roughly 50% annually. The added manpower supports an expanding ecosystem that draws 100 million monthly active users. A top-10 game developer in 2020 would have earned US$50,000 in yearly revenue, while today that number is about US$1mil, according to the company.
Web games make money primarily through advertising. While some developers opt to host them on their own websites, others turn to aggregators like Poki, Playgama or Crazygames.com. Belgium-based Crazygames increased its revenue by 43% over the last four years and expects to hit US$100mil in 2027, according to Raf Mertens, who founded the company a decade ago.
Crazygames and Poki charge more than app stores’ 30% revenue fee for developers on the site. But the companies help developers connect their games to users and make money. Mertens also doesn’t restrict creators from hosting their games themselves elsewhere.
"You can invite people by sharing a link, and they click it and they’re playing,” he said. – Bloomberg
