KEEPING TABS ON WEB GAMING L


By Stein Janssen, COO, Poki


ast year Bloomberg ran a headline I suspect caught a few industry readers off guard: “Video Games’ Hottest New


Platform Is An Old One: Websites.” It made me smile. Web gaming is one of the biggest growth stories in games, and most of the industry still isn’t watching it. The common read is that browser games died with Flash. The reality is the opposite. Flash ended, HTML5 arrived, and the format didn’t fade out. It rebuilt itself into something way bigger. It is that scale that a lot of people often miss.


In 2025, Poki alone reached 625 million players and served 11.1 billion gameplays. Today 100 million people play every month, up from 10 million in 2020. Monthly gameplays went from 50 million to over a billion in those same five years. That is not a relic of the early web. It’s one of the fastest-growing corners of gaming, yet so many developers appear to have ruled it out. Browser games have been around since the late 90s, but they hit the mainstream when


46 | MCV/DEVELOP July/August 2026


Flash took off in the 2000s. Flash was easy to build on, so it became the launchpad for a generation of independent developers. Games like Alien Hominid and Super Meat


“I think web could soon become a default channel rather than an afterthought”


Boy started in the browser before they ever reached a console. For a while, the browser was a place where creativity was able to flourish, and new ideas in games were given the space to be risky.


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