DEV Community: Playgama

A Little Bit Spooky: Playgama Sandbox Second Challenge

Playgama — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 12:37:45 +0000

Every good horror story starts long before anything truly scary happens.
First, there’s a strange noise in the next room. Then the wind picks up. A door moves on its own — probably. Nothing terrible has happened yet, but something feels a little off.

That’s where our second challenge begins.

Let’s build up the atmosphere

October is almost here, and we want to spend the weeks leading up to Halloween making things progressively stranger and scarier.
We’re starting gently with A Little Bit Spooky.

Your challenge is to create a game with a touch of unease. The genre and format are up to you — we’re interested in how you interpret the mood. Maybe the player is looking for objects in a room where things keep moving. Maybe they’re running through a forest at dusk. Maybe they’re solving a perfectly ordinary puzzle while something watches from the corner. It doesn’t have to look or feel like traditional horror. Funny, cute, absurd, and cozy ideas are all welcome.

Create tension, not terror

This week isn’t about making the scariest game possible.
We’re not looking for jump scares or experiences deliberately designed to terrify the player. Think of it as the beginning of a horror story: the part where the atmosphere is slowly building and you’re not sure whether there’s actually something to be afraid of. We want that cozy October feeling with just enough tension to make things interesting. Pumpkins, fog, long shadows, strange sounds, suspicious characters — whatever puts you in the Halloween mood without keeping you awake at night.

Make it your own

There are no restrictions on genre. Build something familiar and give it an eerie twist, or use the challenge as an excuse to try an idea you’ve never made before. As Halloween gets closer, our challenges will get darker. For now, we’re starting with the first strange sound in the night.

Create your version of A Little Bit Spooky and join the challenge.
https://playgama.ai/play/challenge/alittlespooky/

Everyone’s waiting for an open-world game. How about making yours?

Playgama — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 19:47:49 +0000

What would you put in an open-world game if nobody could tell you “that’s a terrible idea”?
You’ve got a week to find out.

Join the Playgama Sandbox Weekly Challenge: every week, we pick a theme, you build a game with AI, and the best one gets published on Playgama.com and distributed further through our publishing network.

We’re starting with open-world robolox graphic style games. While everyone’s waiting for the next chapter of a certain iconic game, you’ve got a week to make your own. Maybe your city is the one we’ll get hooked on?

So, what’s going on in your world?

Maybe the player is trying to make an honest living in a city where absolutely everyone is a scammer. Maybe they’re a pigeon with unfinished business and an entire neighbourhood to terrorise. Or maybe you’ve been sitting on an idea that’s much stranger than anything we could suggest here. We’d quite like to play it.

Give players somewhere to go, something to get caught up in, and things to discover when they wander off. Let them take a job, get distracted halfway through, and end up doing something you probably should have seen coming.

Your game can be weird, ridiculous, or surprisingly chill. What matters is that it’s fun to spend time in.

How much world can you fit into a week?

You don’t need to build an entire continent. A few streets can keep someone busy for hours if there’s enough going on. Start with something the player can do that already feels fun. Driving around, making deliveries, annoying the neighbours, getting into places they probably shouldn’t. Then think about how the world responds. What happens when they ignore the mission? Can they find their own way to solve a problem? Is there something around the corner that makes them change their plans?

Get a playable version together early enough to try those things yourself. You’ll probably discover that one throwaway interaction is more entertaining than the big feature you were planning. Give yourself time to follow that. We want to open your game for a quick look and realise we’ve been playing for half an hour.

How to join

Build your game with your favourite AI tools and publish it on Playgama.ai through Playgama MCP. Your AI assistant can handle publishing directly from tools such as Codex and Claude Code.

You’ll find the challenge on the Playgama.ai homepage. There’s also a button to join inside every game on the platform, so if you’re playing something and thinking “I have an idea for this,” you know where to go.

Open the challenge, check the entry details and deadline, and follow the steps to submit your game within the seven-day window.

Content rules

Submissions must not contain:

Political content, messaging, or propaganda.
Insults or harassment targeting specific individuals or groups.
Racism, hate speech, or discrimination based on race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or other personal characteristics.
Threats or incitement to violence against individuals or groups.
Pornography or sexually explicit material.

Humour, satire, and unusual ideas are welcome, but use common sense and keep your game respectful. Games that violate these rules will be rejected or removed from the Playgama Sandbox Weekly Challenge.

How to boost your chances of winning

Share your game. Once it’s live, post the game’s link on social media.
Show it in action. Make a gameplay video and post it on YouTube, LinkedIn, or Reddit.
Let us know. Tag Playgama and send us the link to your video so we don’t miss it.

We’ll send extra traffic to games featured in your videos, giving you more gameplay sessions, more feedback, and more opportunities to improve your game.

And if your game wins?

The best game gets published on Playgama.com and distributed further through our publishing network. Your week-long project gets a chance to find a wider audience and grow beyond the challenge.
Next week, we’ll bring a new theme. For now, we want to see what happens when you get to make the rules of an entire little world.

Go on, give that idea a playable link: https://playgama.ai/play/challenge/open-world/

Built a game with AI? Get your first players and ad revenue with Playgama MCP

Playgama — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 19:11:40 +0000

Playgama is launching Playgama.ai, an environment created specifically for AI-built games. A place where titles built entirely through agentic development in Codex and Claude Code can be published in the blink of an eye, find new players, earn revenue through ads, get analytics, and grow through UA. Now live in beta.

Games of a new kind are emerging — titles created entirely through agentic development, especially given what the latest models like GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable can do. Playgama is now opening up a way to release an HTML5 game and reach first players straight from Codex or Claude Code, with no manual intervention required from a human developer — through Playgama MCP.

Release your game on the platform with a single prompt and immediately get analytics from your first human players.

From your personal AI-built project to a title released on a gaming platform — in a click
The standard process for publishing games on Playgama looks like this: signing up and logging in to the developer dashboard, integrating an SDK into your game, uploading the game archive, adding a description, submitting images manually, and passing moderation.

Playgama MCP lets you publish to Playgama.ai, a platform built specifically for AI-built games, with a single prompt — in a blink of an eye. As soon as your game is live, it starts being shown to first players across the Playgama network. High engagement pushes a game into trending, where tens of thousands of players discover it.

Once your game is on Playgama.ai, you can share it with anyone by link.

Instructions for humans:

Use the following prompt: Upload this game to Playgama and give me a public playable link. Follow the agent setup instructions at https://playgama.com/mcp/. If my account is not connected, guide me through the one-time setup, then continue with the upload.

Instructions for AI agents:

To upload a game, first read https://wiki.playgama.com/playgama/mcp.md. It contains client setup, token authentication, upload, and sandbox publishing instructions.

If Playgama tools are already connected, verify access and continue. Otherwise, guide the user through connecting their account at https://developer.playgama.com/mcp. The user should save the token in their MCP client settings, not paste it into chat.

For this workflow, return a public sandbox URL. Main catalog submission is a separate step.

The full instructions for humans and artificial beings live on the Playgama Wiki: https://wiki.playgama.com/playgama/mcp

Qualifying for ad monetization
At launch, ad monetization is not open to every game — only to projects that pass a minimum threshold of 100 daily game sessions and clear moderation. To be reviewed, a game has to be uploaded to Playgama the standard way, through the developer dashboard: https://playgama.com/developers

Acquiring new players
From day one, you can bring players from the Playgama network into your AI-built game by running ad campaigns. To set this up, get in touch through this form: https://playgama.com/advertisers

Make publishing part of the process
When you are building with AI, it is easy to keep refining a project before anyone else has tried it. Publishing gives you a clear next step: release it on a gaming platform and see how real players respond.

Playgama MCP brings that step into your development workflow, with free promotion to help your game reach its first players.

Ready to release yours?
Get started with Playgama MCP: https://playgama.com/mcp/
Read the setup and publishing guide: https://wiki.playgama.com/playgama/mcp

Playgama releases Wrap, completing its infrastructure for scaling games on standalone websites

Playgama — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 12:12:26 +0000

Games on their own domains now have a full stack behind them — publishing, monetization, and growth.
Playgama releases Wrap, a free service that turns an HTML5 game into a standalone website — with its own domain, built-in monetization via Playgama Ad, ready-made UX, in-game purchases, SEO, and player analytics out of the box.

Publishing takes three steps and about five minutes: integrate the open-source Playgama Bridge SDK, upload the game, then configure and publish it in the console. Updates sync automatically. The only thing the developer pays for is the domain — and they own it outright.

Playgama Wrap will be available through Developer Dashboard, with a gradual rollout to all developers over the coming weeks. The first developers get access today, August 21. Parts of the stack can be used without uploading the game to Playgama — full instructions are on our Wiki.

Three products, one infrastructure: launch, scale, and earn
With the release of Wrap, Playgama has completed its new infrastructure for games on standalone websites, which now covers the full cycle: publishing, monetization, and growth.

The other two pieces — monetization and growth — are covered by Playgama Ad and by Playgama DSP, which is part of it.

Playgama Ad is an ad monetization solution built specifically for games on the web; it is used both by individual HTML5 games on standalone websites and by large-scale web game portals and instant-play platforms, lifting CPMs through premium demand and bringing web inventory closer to mobile ad rates. Connected from day one with Wrap.
Playgama DSP lets developers acquire new players for a game from Playgama’s web gaming network. Developers run their own campaigns and bring in new players on a CPM or CPC basis.

As a result, any developer whose game can be exported to HTML5 — which may originally be a mobile or PC project — can launch it on a standalone website in five minutes, then grow and monetize it as an additional channel.

Dmitry Kachmar, Founder of Playgama: “The industry has shifted again, and games on standalone domains have grown into a segment of their own. We see midcore projects, social live-service games, and a large share of revenue coming from in-game purchases. Gaming used to be built entirely on platform-driven discovery and algorithms — now developers want to take back control and scale games on their own terms. Our job is to give them the tools. And while the cost of acquiring players in mobile stores is turning them into a red ocean, the open internet is still a blue one, on mobile and desktop alike.”

Early results from developers using Wrap

Hazmob, Piece of Cake, Drive Quest Online, and Gas Station are among the first titles to use The Wrap, and their early numbers show session time, retention, and revenue per user already outperforming some of the established channels they ship on.

Three months after launch with The Wrap, Hazmob FPS draws 120,000 visits a month to its own domain. The channel already delivers revenue comparable to many of the platforms and ecosystems the game is present on, and it’s expected to grow severalfold over the next 6–12 months.

Ozgur Hazar, Founder of Hazmob: “With Playgama, our standalone site went from an experiment to one of our most promising channels. What matters more is that it is ours: the traffic, the brand, the monetization setup. That is the part no store or portal can give you.”

The new infrastructure is the strongest fit for games that are platform-agnostic by nature and ship across many ecosystems at once — and the early adopters bear that out. Every one of them is live both in traditional mobile app stores and on standalone websites built with The Wrap.

A standalone website is rarely a full replacement for app stores and instant-play platforms — more often, it is an additional channel that reaches a different audience. But unlike any store or portal, this channel belongs to the developer entirely.

That ownership is what Wrap unlocks. Any game with the right potential can now build its own presence on the web and grow into a business in its own right.

Go standalone: https://playgama.com/wrap/

Summer Jam by Playgama, $ prize pool + YouTube Playables publishing

Playgama — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 08:24:03 +0000

We'd like to invite you to the Playgama AFK Summer Jam, which is running from July 10-31.

The theme is all about finding inspiration beyond your desk. Whether it's a vacation, a road trip, a heatwave, or a random summer moment, turn it into a playable web game.

🏆 $1,000 Prize Pool
▶️ The winning game will receive a publishing opportunity on YouTube Playables, one of the most promising platforms for web games today.
🌍 The top three games will also be published on Playgama.com and distributed across our partner network.

Join: https://itch.io/jam/playgama-afk-summer-jam

Introducing the Web Games Industry Market Map (2026)

Playgama — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 09:37:44 +0000

Gaming lives everywhere: across platforms, messengers, media websites, standalone URLs, YouTube, Discord, airplane seat screens, and plenty of places we wouldn't have imagined a few years ago.

Behind all of this is a web gaming ecosystem that has grown into hundreds of companies building engines, platforms, tools, monetization solutions, publishing services, analytics, and much more. We decided to capture that in a single industry map. Fortunately, Playgama ended up appearing more than once, which says something about the breadth of our own ecosystem 😄
The web gaming market is growing fast, and we're excited to help make it more visible.

Huge thanks to GamesBeat, PocketGamer.biz, GamesHedge and Games Press for covering this project.
How many logos do you recognize? 👀

YouTube Playables might become one of the most important platforms for web games

Playgama — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 11:23:03 +0000

YouTube Playables monetization is finally rolling out, the platform has an interesting stack:
• prerolls
• interstitials
• rewarded ads
Right now there are only ~450 games on the platform, while the audience potential is massive.

We’re already seeing strong ad performance there and YouTube plans to expand monetization beyond the US in Summer 2026.

Playgama is currently top-1 on YouTube Playables by total gameplays this year (100M+). The platform is still early enough to get real visibility if your game fits the ecosystem.
Wanna join? We know how ;)

Playgama here, hi!

Playgama — Tue, 26 May 2026 11:26:31 +0000

We're Playgama and we think web game distribution was broken (till we came)

As you know, publishing a web game can be a mess.
You build something cool, then spend the next week copy-pasting your game into 10 different portals, filling out the same forms, re-exporting assets, and praying that everything works correctly on each platform. We are developers in the first place, so we got tired of it and built Playgama Bridge SDK..

It’s a free and open-source SDK that helps developers publish games across multiple web platforms with a single integration, so there is no need rebuilding the same thing over and over again.

And honestly, the SDK is only part of it.

Over the last few years, we’ve built a lot of expertise around web game distribution itself: platform requirements, optimization, monetization, approvals, things that quietly kill performance after launch — all the stuff nobody tells you about until you hit it yourself.

You can check out the platforms we work with on our website.
There are quite a few :)

A lot of developers and studios are already publishing with us, and right now we’re especially focused on YouTube Playables.

It’s one of the most interesting opportunities in web gaming right now: massive audience potential, native discovery through YouTube, and still not overloaded with games, which means good projects still have a real chance to stand out instead of disappearing instantly in an overcrowded store.

If you’re curious about the platform, web publishing in general, or just want to ask questions — even uncomfortable ones — write to us.

Toodles!