A finished browser game is a bundle of static files. Whether you built it in Phaser, Three.js, Babylon.js, Godot, or plain canvas code, the output uploads anywhere, which is exactly why the publishing decision trips people up. Every channel accepts the same build, so the choice is never technical. It is about who owns the audience, who owns the money, and who owns the URL.
Here is how the three channels actually compare once you have shipped to all of them.
The Three Channels
Game portals aggregate thousands of titles, monetize with ads, and share revenue. Indie platforms like itch.io act as storefronts you control, with community feedback attached. Self-hosting on your own domain gives you everything except an audience.
Most developers who do this well use more than one at the same time. The marginal cost of adding a channel is usually just reading the submission guidelines and wiring up an SDK, so treating them as either/or leaves reach on the table for no reason.
What Portals Actually Require
CrazyGames reaches over 20 million monthly players and runs a two stage process. Basic Launch takes your game with minimal integration and tests it with a limited audience for around two weeks. Hit their engagement benchmarks and you are invited to Full Launch, which needs the full SDK for ads, auth, cloud saves, and analytics. Their technical bar for Basic Launch is an initial download under 50 MB, fewer than 1,500 files, and PEGI 12 content.
Poki is curated and editorially reviewed, leans mobile-responsive, and pulls strong search traffic with a younger audience. GameDistribution syndicates across hundreds of publisher sites through an embed widget, so you get reach but little brand visibility. Newgrounds still rewards experimental work with a community that engages rather than an SDK that monetizes.
The trade in all four cases is the same: the portal brings the players, and in return it owns the player relationship and can change terms whenever it wants.
Self-Hosting Without a Backend
A web game needs no backend unless it has multiplayer or accounts. Push the files to object storage, put a CDN in front, point DNS at it, and you are live for a few dollars a month. Netlify, Vercel, and Cloudflare Pages collapse that further into a drag and drop or a git push, with HTTPS and global distribution handled for you.
What you gain is ownership: the URL, the page design, the analytics, the ad units or Stripe checkout, and the domain authority that compounds into organic search traffic over time. What you take on is audience acquisition, which for a new domain starts at approximately zero.
The middle ground is the answer for most people. Ship to portals for immediate reach and ad revenue, keep the polished version on your own domain as the destination you actually control, and send everyone there when you have something bigger to launch.
Delivery Details That Decide Load Time
Players quit during the loading bar, so delivery is not a detail. Three things matter more than the rest.
Content-hashed filenames let you cache aggressively. When game.js becomes game.a3f8b2.js, you can set a one year expiry safely, because the name changes whenever the bytes change. Returning players then load almost entirely from cache.
Brotli compression beats gzip on JavaScript bundles by roughly 15 to 20 percent. Most CDNs do it automatically, but verify the Content-Encoding header instead of assuming.
Progressive loading beats a single monolithic download. Load only what the title screen and first level need, then stream the rest while the player is already playing.
The Takeaway
Publishing is not one decision with a right answer, it is three channels with different costs. Portals cost you control, self-hosting costs you reach, and doing nothing costs you both. Pick a portal for players, keep your own domain as the home base, and spend the saved effort on load times, because that is the part every channel judges you on.
The full breakdown, including submission requirements per portal, CDN setup, and the discoverability side, is here: https://www.abratabia.com/publishing-web-games/
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