Where our games come from

Poki Games stores no game files. Every title runs from its publisher’s own servers, inside a frame on the game page. This page explains who those publishers are and what we record about them, because “free browser games” tells you nothing about where a game actually came from.

The distribution feed

Almost the whole catalogue, a little over 37,500 titles, comes from GameMonetize, a network that licenses HTML5 games to sites like this one and pays their developers through advertising. Those games are served from the network’s infrastructure, and the adverts you see are placed by the publisher inside the game frame, not by us.

What that means in practice: when you press play on one of these, your browser talks to the network and to the ad services it uses, and they can see your IP address and set their own storage inside that frame. We cannot see into it, and nothing about it reaches our server. The privacy policy goes through this in detail.

The hand-checked set

The rest, 117 titles at the last count, was added one at a time from developers who publish their own source code under an open licence: MIT, Apache 2.0, BSD, MPL and the Unlicense among them. Authors in this part of the catalogue include Frank Force (LittleJS), Kenta Cho, James William Fletcher, Dominic Szablewski and Google’s Blockly Games.

Every one of these was opened in a real browser with each network request recorded, including requests made by frames nested inside them. None of them loads advertising. A handful load Google Analytics on their author’s behalf, and that is noted where it applies.

What each game page records

The fact table under every game names four things worth knowing before you start it:

• Source: the developer or network that publishes the game;
• Terms: the licence or permission the listing rests on;
• Advertising: whether the publisher shows adverts inside the frame;
• Mobile: whether it has touch controls or needs a keyboard.

Named, not linked

Sources are named in text rather than hyperlinked. This site carries no outbound links on purpose, and the licences involved attach their conditions to redistributing code, which we do not do, since a game runs from its author’s own host. The full URLs are stored against every game and kept in the project’s source audit.

If a game is yours

Tell us and we will add it, correct it or remove it. Removal at an author’s request needs no proof and no argument: see the contact page, or the copyright page if you would rather send a formal notice.