Where to publish HTML5 games, portal by portal

Start with where your players are and what you can give up. CrazyGames and GameDistribution take submissions through their developer portals, so they suit a first release and a game you want to spread widely. Poki pays half of the revenue from its own traffic, but it hand-picks games and asks for web exclusivity. YouTube Playables puts the game inside YouTube, with a load target under 5 seconds and access by invitation. itch.io is less about traffic and more about a community, a public link and paid downloads, and its limits are the most relaxed.

A common path is itch.io for the first public build and feedback, CrazyGames Basic Launch to see how real portal traffic plays it, and then either a Poki application or a wide release through the open portals. Keep a desktop version in mind as well. Poki's exclusivity covers the open web only, so a Steam release of the same game stays possible.

Browsers only enable SharedArrayBuffer, the feature WebAssembly threads depend on, on pages that are cross-origin isolated with the Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy and Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy headers. That isolation also blocks cross-origin requests the page did not opt into, which is a problem for ad SDKs, analytics and embeds. Godot's own write-up of its 4.3 web export names the core issue. Most web games are published on third-party platforms where the authors may not even be able to set the required headers.

A single-threaded build needs none of this and runs on ordinary hosting and in portal iframes. That holds for any engine. In Godot 4.3 and later single-threaded is the default, and our Godot web export guide has the exact steps. itch.io does offer a SharedArrayBuffer checkbox. It sets the isolation headers on your files and uses COEP credentialless on the embedding page, but Safari does not support credentialless, so a threaded build is still a risk there. For portals, single-threaded is the safe choice.

Chrome allows sound only after the user has interacted with the page, apart from a few exceptions such as installed apps. An AudioContext created before that gesture starts suspended, and you must resume it afterward. On iOS, CrazyGames tells developers to call resume inside a user gesture such as touchend or click to restore audio after the system interrupts it.

In Godot 4.3 and later, web exports play audio as samples instead of streams by default, which keeps sound clean on single-threaded builds but means audio effects are not supported in that mode. Plan your mix around that, and test on a phone before you submit.

• Show a Play or Tap to start screen before any audio.
• Create or resume the AudioContext inside that click or touch handler.
• Mute everything while a portal ad plays and restore it after.
• Test with the phone's silent switch on and off.

Portals measure what the player downloads before gameplay, not the size of your whole game. Load a small first scene and fetch the rest in the background. Compress textures and prefer compressed audio for music. itch.io's CDN serves files ending in .br as Brotli, so precompressed builds are an option there. YouTube Playables recommends individual files under 512 KiB, which is a good discipline for every portal.

Summer Engine is a desktop app for macOS and Windows and builds desktop games for Steam and itch.io downloads. Web export is not available in Summer yet. If your game has to run in a browser today, build it with a web-capable tool such as three.js, Phaser or stock Godot 4, and see our Godot web export guide for the Godot settings.

Summer still helps a web game in two ways. Studio generates the art and sound, and a desktop version built in Summer can go on Steam or itch.io next to the browser game.