Web game portals compared: revenue share, SDKs, limits

The table above lists what each portal publishes about money, rights, integration and review. Every cell links to the official page it comes from and shows the date we last compared the two. Values marked “not published” are missing from the portal’s public documentation, not unknown to the industry; we leave them empty rather than guess.

How to read the table

• Published values paraphrase the official page. Follow the link before relying on one: portals update terms, and the agreement you sign overrides anything on a help page.
• Conditional values depend on the deal type, launch stage or a program you have to be admitted to. The portal page explains the condition.
• Size limits are written with the unit the portal uses. When a portal writes “MB” without defining it, the Portal Readiness Checker treats builds between 10^6 and 2^20 bytes per MB as borderline and warns instead of passing.
• Google H5 Games Ads is not a portal. It is an ad API for games you host yourself, so exclusivity and review work differently. It is here because it is the main alternative to portal revenue for a game on your own domain.

What differs most

Revenue models are not one-to-one comparable. Three networks publish a flat share: GameDistribution 33% of net revenue, GameMonetize 45% (90% when you also publish on your own site), and Y8 50% of eligible in-game ad revenue. Poki splits by traffic source: all revenue from players who come to your game directly, half from players Poki sends, and it calls these terms indicative. CrazyGames calculates compensation monthly from plays and ad performance without publishing a percentage. itch.io is a storefront where you choose the platform’s cut of sales, and H5 Games Ads pays through AdSense. None of them publish typical earnings per player, so a higher percentage does not tell you which pays more.

Exclusivity ranges from none to five years. Poki’s revenue-share deals are web-exclusive, with five years given as the indicative default (Poki revenue deal types). CrazyGames is non-exclusive by default but pays 50% more for an optional two-month exclusive period after Full Launch. The others state no exclusivity requirement.

Most portals require their own SDK. CrazyGames (for Full Launch and any revenue), Poki, GameDistribution, GameMonetize, Y8 and YouTube Playables all require their SDK. Only itch.io needs none. Since each SDK has different calls and ad rules, plan for one build per portal. The SDK guides show one way to keep game code identical with a small adapter per portal.

Only three publish hard size limits. CrazyGames limits the initial download, total size and file count; itch.io limits extracted size, file count and single-file size; YouTube Playables limits initial bundle, total size, per-file size and file count. Poki gives size guidance rather than a cap. The rest publish nothing, which does not mean anything goes: slow loading is a common reason for poor results on any portal.

Review ranges from none to multi-stage. itch.io lets you publish immediately (indexing is reviewed for new sellers). CrazyGames and Poki run staged launches with limited audiences before a full release, YouTube Playables certifies every release, and H5 Games Ads is by application, needs an approved AdSense account (Ad Placement API sign-up) and serves ads only on a site with “Ready” status in AdSense (AdSense site management).

AI-content policies are sparse. Poki, Y8 and itch.io say how they treat AI-assisted games; GameDistribution only addresses deep fakes; Google’s publisher policies, which apply to H5 Games Ads, restrict ads on automatically generated content that has not been reviewed; CrazyGames, GameMonetize and YouTube Playables publish nothing specific. See the AI-assisted prototyping guide for what that means in practice.

What this comparison does not cover

It does not rank portals, estimate earnings, or describe how selective each portal is in practice: those depend on your game and are not published. It covers eight options that publish developer documentation in English; other portals are not included yet. Each portal page lists what we could not verify.

Keeping it current

We re-check each cell against its source and update the date when we do. If you see a value that no longer matches the linked page, tell us with the URL.