In 2010, the browser game was Flash. Newgrounds hosted hundreds of thousands of titles. Kongregate had 90,000+. Armor Games made a sustainable business out of curating Flash games and revenue-sharing with developers. The whole format was an open ecosystem: anyone could publish, anyone could embed, anyone could right-click and view source.
Then Steve Jobs wrote his Thoughts on Flash letter in April 2010, refusing to support Flash on iOS. By 2015 Flash was dying. By 2020 Adobe formally end-of-lifed it. Browsers stopped running it. Tens of thousands of games — many of them genuinely good — became unplayable overnight, except via emulator projects like Ruffle, which still do not run everything.
HTML5 was supposed to be the replacement
Canvas, WebGL, Web Audio, modern JavaScript. In theory, anything Flash could do, HTML5 could do better. In practice, the transition was uneven. The technical story is mostly fine: HTML5 game engines like Phaser, PixiJS, and Three.js are mature, and modern browsers can run remarkably complex games at 60fps. The economic story is messier.
What got better
Mobile. Flash never really worked on phones. HTML5 does. The same game runs on iPhone, Android, desktop, and a Chromebook in a school computer lab without per-platform builds. Discoverability also got better in some ways: a well-made HTML5 game can be embedded into thousands of sites simultaneously without losing referral data.
What got worse
Curation collapsed. The 2010s portal model — where editors actually selected games — gave way to algorithmic everything. Most of the top games portals in 2025 are ranked by ad revenue per session, not editorial quality. The result is a uniformity: 200 sites that all show roughly the same 60 games, all licensed from a handful of distribution networks (Famobi, GameDistribution, CrazyGames being the largest).
Independent developers got squeezed. A solo developer in 2012 could put a game on Newgrounds, get noticed, and build a following. The same developer in 2025 has to either license to a network (which keeps 50%+ of revenue) or self-publish to a sea of identical-looking aggregator sites with no path to discovery.
What is coming
A few things give us hope. First, the open web is still open — anyone can host an HTML5 game on any domain, and modern browsers will run it. The friction is finding it, not building it. Second, search engines are slowly punishing the worst aggregator sites for thin content and excessive ads, which gives careful curators an opening. Third, mobile users are tired of app downloads — play in browser is increasingly attractive again.
Where we fit
GerGame is, deliberately, a small site. We list 23 games, all original. We pay attention to whether games actually work on a mid-range phone. We write editorial reviews. We do not shove auto-play video ads inside the game frame. We are not trying to compete with the 200 aggregators on volume; we are trying to be the place someone bookmarks because the experience is consistently good.
Whether this works as a business is an open question. Curation is harder than aggregation, and Google and Facebook still send most of their traffic to whoever optimized for AdSense scores fastest. But the alternative — yet another portal of identical reskinned games — is not a thing the world needs more of.