There is a question that comes up again and again in developer forums, usually phrased slightly wrong: where should I publish my HTML5 game? The better version of that question — the one people actually mean — is which of these places has anybody on it? Because a site that accepts your upload and a site that has an audience are not the same site, and the difference is not advertised anywhere.
The short answer. You can tell a host from an audience by looking at the portal's own pages for five minutes, before you spend an evening uploading. Audiences need discovery surfaces — a Popular shelf, sort controls, a New queue, ratings. Hosts just need an upload form. This article is about how to read those signals, and about being realistic on what a listing does for you.
In a long-running thread on r/gamedev about where to publish HTML5 games, the person asking said something revealing: they had assumed itch.io was a place developers go, not a place players go. Another commenter corrected them.
It is an easy mistake, and it is worth understanding why it happens. If you arrive at itch.io as a developer, the first thing you meet is a dashboard, an upload flow and a lot of other developers. The player side is real, but you are not standing in it.
So the mistake is not stupidity — it is a genuine perspective problem. And it generalises: you cannot judge a portal's audience from the developer-facing side of it. You have to go and look at the part players see.
Here is the thing that makes this checkable rather than a matter of opinion. Player-facing features are expensive to build and pointless to fake. Nobody builds a "sort by most played this month" control for an empty catalogue. So the presence of real discovery machinery is decent evidence that somebody is browsing.
Things to look for, roughly in order of how much they tell you:
We went and counted, on 30 July 2026. This is what each portal's own popular/trending page contained on that date, and whether it explained its ordering to the visitor. These are observations of public pages, not endorsements, and shelves like these change — re-check before relying on any number.
| Portal | Popular page | Titles on the shelf | Explains its ordering? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Poki | /en/popular | 111 | Yes — intro text plus an FAQ that literally asks "what makes these so popular?" |
| Y8 | /popular/games | 72 | No prose disclosure, but prints a numeric user score on each card |
| CrazyGames | /hot | 40 | Yes — a subtitle attributing the order to what its users play most |
| itch.io | /games/html5 | 36 per page, paginated into a very large catalogue | Yes, and best-in-class — ordering is five named, linkable URLs |
| Newgrounds | /games | Selectable | Yes — explicit Sort By (Date / Score / Views) and a time Range |
The pattern is more useful than any individual number. Every one of these treats "popular" as a way of sorting the whole catalogue, and every one either explains the basis in prose or exposes it as a control you can click. Two of them — itch.io and Newgrounds — let you change the sort yourself, which is the clearest sign of all that the ordering is computed from something real.
One honest counter-example, because it is instructive: at least one large portal labels an editor-curated shelf "Popular" in its navigation while the underlying URL says editors_choice. Hand-picking is completely legitimate. Calling it "popular" without saying so is the bit to watch out for — and it is a reminder that the label on a shelf is not evidence of anything.
Back to that r/gamedev thread, because the asker's framing was the most useful part of it. They explained that they could already host their own site and do their own marketing, and then asked which platform helps if you want — in their words — "to rely on some organic traffic".
That is the product being shopped for. Not features, not a nicer upload form, not a badge. Organic traffic. People who find your game without you having told them about it.
And the top reply's answer was the honest one: platforms do not magically discover and promote you — but being listed in more places still helps. That is worth sitting with, because it is both halves of the truth at once, and most advice online only gives you one half.
What a portal listing genuinely does for you:
What it does not do:
The practical conclusion: list in several places because it is nearly free to do so, and then promote it yourself as though you had not. That is not cynicism, it is just the correct order of operations.
Some portals share ad revenue with developers. It is a real thing and it is usually much smaller than people expect at small scale.
In that same thread, one self-identified publisher disclosed earnings of roughly €0.2 per day across a portfolio of games on several monetisation platforms. Two things about that figure, and please hold both:
Plan as though portal revenue is zero. If it turns out to be more, good.
That last one applies to your own site too, by the way. An embedded game can be perfectly fine in your build folder and quietly broken once it is on someone else's domain — embeds get blocked by domain rules, referrer checks and CORS more often than anyone expects. Always load the live page and press play yourself.
It would be strange to write all of the above and then make an exception for ourselves, so: SlowDen is small and new, and you should apply the same test to it that you apply to anyone else.
What is true today: SlowDen takes browser-game submissions from developers for free, through the submission page. Submissions come to SlowDen for review. Slow Cook is an ongoing creative challenge — you get a prompt, you build a small browser game around it, and you submit it for consideration. Selected entries get a chance to be featured on the homepage and a shoutout across SlowDen's social accounts.
What is not true, and what we are not going to imply: SlowDen cannot promise you traffic, players, revenue, followers, press or a homepage slot. It is not the biggest or best anything. If you submit a game expecting an audience to be delivered to you, you will be disappointed — and that would be our fault for having implied it, not yours for having believed it.
The honest pitch is the one that thread already articulated better than we could: one more real place your game exists, and a creative prompt to build something small around. That's it. You keep your game either way.
Both, and that is the point people miss. itch.io is where a great many developers upload, which is why it can feel like a developer space from the inside. But it also runs player-facing discovery — its HTML5 section exposes Popular, New & Popular, Top sellers, Top rated and Most Recent as five separate browsable URLs. Those controls only exist because people browse them.
More than one, and fewer than all of them. A web build costs you nothing to list again, so there is no reason to stop at one portal. But every listing is a page you may later want to update, so pick a handful you can actually maintain rather than uploading to thirty places once and forgetting them.
It might, and nobody can promise it will. A listing makes your game findable in one more place; it does not make anyone look for it. Developers who report the best results treat portals as one part of their own promotion rather than a replacement for it.
Some portals share ad revenue, and it is usually much smaller than people expect at small scale. Treat any figure you read as one developer's report about their own games on their own platforms, not as a rate card. Plan as though the revenue is zero and be pleasantly surprised.
It needs to be playable and it needs to explain itself in one screen. A small finished game that a stranger can understand in ten seconds travels much better than a large unfinished one. Nothing about a portal listing rewards scope.
So you can check it rather than take our word for it:
The most common reason a finished web game never gets played is that it never got listed anywhere. That is a fixable problem and it takes an afternoon.
Where to publish free in 2026 Submit your game to SlowDen See Slow Cook