Publishing pipelines are usually described in marketing verbs, so here's ours in engineering ones — the actual sequence a build traverses on Malaguo from upload to earning page, written for people who distrust diagrams with too many smiling arrows.
Precondition. One ZIP, index.html at the archive root. That file is the contract: it's what browsers will load, so it's what review will judge.
1. Quarantine. The archive lands in isolation before anything inside it executes. The ordering is the security property: we inspect a static, contained artifact, never a live one. No "scan on first run" — no first run at all until inspection is done.
2. Static inspection. Structure and dependency review: what the build is made of, what it bundles, what it reaches for.
3. Runtime inspection. The build runs — inside containment — and its behavior gets watched: what it does, what it touches, what it tries.
4. Automated playability. Loads, runs, accepts input, is playable in the machine-verifiable sense. This gate protects reviewer hours from builds that crash at boot; it deliberately claims nothing about quality.
5. Human review. A person plays the exact artifact from the precondition. Version-scoped, not account-scoped: a new build means a new review, with no credit for your track record. This is also where our own AI studio's output queues — builds generated in-house from governed blueprints get zero bypass, because any pipeline with a trusted-origin fast lane will eventually ship its worst artifact down exactly that lane.
6. Approval gate. Binary and load-bearing: no public URL exists before it. Upload is not publish here; approval is.
7. Publication fan-out. Approval triggers the distribution build: a page for the game; whole-page translation into multiple languages — full page, not a title string — with each language version indexed for search separately; deployment to a global CDN; ad integration scoped to the game's own pages; and payout accounting attributed per game, the bigger share to the creator. Attribution scoped to your pages matters more than it first sounds: your revenue tracks your game's sessions, not a fraction of some sitewide pool.
Loop. Ship an update, re-enter at step one. Same gates, every version, forever.
Notes for the skeptical, since dev.to comment sections keep people honest: we publish no earnings estimates — revenue is a function of sessions and traffic mix, neither knowable for a game we haven't seen, and any platform quoting figures upfront is writing fiction. There's no listing fee, and no exclusivity — the same ZIP can stay live on itch, Game Jolt, your own domain, anywhere. Terms are public before account creation.
If you've shipped a browser game — or have a brief our AI studio could turn into a build that faces the same gates as everything else — the pipeline starts at:
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