About Arcadoria

A small, hand-picked catalogue of browser games. Everything here runs in a tab, starts in one click, and was played by a person before it went on the site.

What this is

Arcadoria lists games across 0 categories. Each one has a page with a description, the controls, and a few tips, and a Play button that loads the game directly in your browser. There is nothing to download, nothing to install and no account to create — there is no account system at all.

Why it is small

Most browser-game sites list thousands of titles. That sounds generous and is mostly not: five thousand games with a one-line auto-generated blurb each is a search problem, not a collection, and it puts the burden of quality control on you. We cap the catalogue at around 180 games instead.

The point of the cap is that it forces a decision on every game. When there is a limit, adding one thing means dropping another, and a mediocre game has to beat something already on the site rather than simply exist.

Where the games come from

Games are supplied through official distribution feeds — currently GamePix, with GameMonetize as a second source. These are the channels developers publish through, and playing a game here pays its developer through the platform's revenue share, exactly as it would on the platform's own site.

Nothing on this site is ripped, re-hosted or mirrored. We never copy a game file. Every game runs from its publisher's own servers inside a frame, which is both the licensed way to do it and the only way the developer gets paid. If you hold rights in something here and disagree, the removal process is on the DMCA page and it is a real process, not a formality.

How games get chosen

The catalogue starts as a feed of several thousand titles and gets cut down in three passes.

1. Two categories are excluded outright. Games aimed at young children are rejected, and so are casino and slots games. A game is rejected if any of its categories falls in those groups, not just its main one — that detail matters, because a game filed under "puzzle" with a children's tag would otherwise slip straight through.
2. Quality ranking within each category. What is left is ranked using the publisher's own engagement score, and each category gets a fixed share of the catalogue. Without the per-category quota one large category would swallow the entire site, since arcade games alone make up close to half of what is available upstream.
3. A person plays it. See below.

The categories that survived this are . Other categories exist in the code but have no live games yet.

Why we exclude children's games and gambling games

Children's games are the single biggest category in browser gaming and excluding them costs us traffic. We do it because a site aimed at children takes on obligations under children's privacy law that we are not set up to meet properly, and doing that job badly is worse than not doing it. The site is built for teenagers and adults, and the catalogue matches.

Casino and slots games are excluded for a simpler reason: we do not want to run gambling mechanics next to games for teenagers, whether or not money changes hands.

How the writing works

Every game page is written here. We never publish the publisher's own description, because that same paragraph appears word for word on every competing site, which helps nobody who is trying to decide what to play.

A game only goes live once someone has actually opened it and signed off on what the page says about it. That signature is stored with the game and the build refuses to publish a game without one, so an unverified draft cannot reach the site by accident.

The rule we hold ourselves to on controls: describe what we observed, not what sounds plausible. Publisher descriptions frequently omit the key bindings, and inventing a control scheme that reads convincingly and turns out to be wrong is worse than saying less. If we did not confirm it, the page describes the objective and leaves the specifics alone.

Games change after they are published, so pages do go stale. If a control or a tip is wrong, email [email protected] and we will fix it or pull the game.

How this pays for itself

Two ways, and neither is a secret.

• Advertising inside the games. Each game carries its publisher's own advertising inside the play frame. That revenue is split between the developer, the platform and us. It is the same advertising you would see playing the game anywhere else, and we are contractually required not to block or cover it.
• Display advertising on the page. This is not running yet. When it is, the rules below apply from the first ad. At most 3 ad units on a game page, 2 on the home page, 3 in an article, and none at all on this page or any other legal page. Never above the game. Never auto-refreshing. No pop-ups, no interstitials, no countdown before you can play.

Those limits are not aspirations written on an about page; they are enforced in the code that renders the ad slots, and a page that asks for more units than its cap allows does not get them.

What we do not do: we do not accept payment to feature a game or to rank one higher, we do not run sponsored posts, and we do not sell anything. The Privacy Policy names every third party that can see you, with what each one receives.

Who runs it

Arcadoria is operated by StellarByte Tech. It is a deliberately modest project: no venture money, no growth targets, no plans to turn into a launcher or an app. The best outcome we can think of is that you find something to play in under a minute and come back the next time you have ten minutes to spare.

Corrections, broken games, suggestions and complaints all go to [email protected]. Rights holders should use the DMCA page. The Terms of Use cover the legal shape of all this.