About Poki Games
What this catalogue is, who runs it, and how a game ends up on it.
Poki Games is a catalogue of HTML5 games that run in a browser tab. Nothing is installed or downloaded, and there is no account to create. You open a game page, press play, and the game loads.
What we actually do
We do not host the games. Each one is embedded from the page its publisher runs it on, and the game page records where that is and under which terms. Our work is the catalogue around it: sorting titles by genre and by how they are controlled, keeping the counts and the covers honest, and pulling a game once it stops loading.
The catalogue has two halves
Most of it arrives from a games distribution feed. Those titles are hosted and monetised by their own publishers, which means they show advertising inside the game frame — that is how they are paid for, and it is why they are free.
The smaller half was added by hand. Those games come from authors who publish their own source under an open licence, and each of them was opened in a real browser with every network request recorded: none of them loads an advert. Which half a game belongs to is written on its page, in the Advertising row, before you press play. The longer version is on where our games come from.
What gets in
A title has to clear the same checks before it is published:
- it is reachable over HTTPS and returns a working page;
- its response headers do not forbid embedding — we check the headers, not only the terms;
- there is a licence or a written permission that allows it to be embedded on a third-party site;
- it is not built on someone else’s characters, and it is not adult content.
If a game fails any of these it does not go in. If it starts failing later, it comes out.
Reporting a problem
Every game page has a Report button. If a game stops loading, shows the wrong thing, or should not be here at all, that is the fastest way to tell us. Rights holders should use the copyright page, which sets out exactly what we need in order to act.
Independence
Poki Games is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any other games portal, and it does not claim to be.