adding fresh content. Today more than 600 developers build on Poki and the top earners make up to a million dollars a year from ads alone. The rest of the industry is now moving the same way. Closed
ecosystems are under pressure from players, developers and regulators alike, and the appetite for instant, accessible play keeps growing. Established franchises have begun taking notice, with SYBO’s Subway Surfers, Fingersoft’s Hill Climb Racing and Outfit7’s Talking Tom having all come to the browser looking for fresh reach. How we spend attention has shifted too. We reach for short, instant
entertainment in the gaps of the day. Not just the gamers, but parents, commuters and anyone with five minutes between meetings. Web gaming fits those moments precisely, because there’s nothing to install. Players can jump from one game to the next with no downtime in between, which makes finding a new game to play feel effortless. The gap now is perception, not capability. A recent study found 27%
Then Flash declined, slowly losing support until Adobe shut it
down for good at the end of 2020, and a lot of people assumed browser gaming went with it. However, the people who assumed this were watching the wrong thing. Browser gaming had already moved on. When Bas Moeys and Michiel van Amerongen founded Poki in 2014,
they made a bet that looked contrarian at the time. While the rest of the industry was running toward app stores, Bas and Michiel built on HTML5 and the open web instead. They both believed that play should be universal, and nothing is more universal than a browser. It doesn’t require a download or sign-up before you start. You just need to tap and play. That bet aged well. While mobile turned gaming into a set of
walled gardens, and Apple famously blocked Flash on iOS, the open web kept the door open to everyone. Having zero friction between a player and a game is a real advantage for instant playability. Poki paired that with a second bet, this one about developers.
Where other platforms paid studios a one-time licensing fee, Poki was the first on the open web to share ad revenue with them. It sounds like a small change but it really isn’t. When studios earn on every play, they are encouraged to keep investing in their games and
numbers shown in that study, which revealed 37% of interviewed gamers play web games ‘multiple times per day’. Web gaming is also a launchpad for discovery, with 62% of players having downloaded or purchased a game after discovering it on the web. The strength of HTML5 is that it runs on anything with a modern
browser. This means that web games are not tied to a desktop or a phone anymore: web games run on a laptop, a tablet, a smart TV, and even the screen built into a car. Because the web skips the app-store middleman, a single build of a game can reach all of those screens at once. With an optional login, a player’s progress can also follow them from one to the next. So where does this go next? Simply put, I think web could soon
become a default channel rather than an afterthought. Studios will stop asking whether their game should be on the web and start asking which version of their game lives there instead. It has everything developers are seeking. The audience for these games are already there and the tools to make games are available. And developers have proven they can earn a living through the web. The future of gaming belongs to whoever makes it easiest to play.
July/August 2026 MCV/DEVELOP | 47
of developers still call web gaming a legacy channel and 54% a “fun nostalgia channel.” This goes against the actual player engagement
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