We get asked how a game ends up on H5 Bros, usually by people who assume the answer is "you upload it and you are done." It is not. A game we build can sit unlisted for days while we play it on the worst phone we own, and plenty never get listed at all. This is the checklist we actually run, in roughly the order we run it.
1. Does it start in under three seconds?
The first thing we measure is the gap between clicking play and being able to do something. Not "the page loaded" — actually able to play. If a game shows a spinner, a logo, and a "tap to start" before the first real input, those seconds add up, and on a slow connection they multiply. We hold our games to the same instant-start promise we make on the homepage. If it cannot get out of its own way, it does not ship.
2. Is the rule obvious without text?
We open the game cold and see if we understand it before reading anything. A game like Infinity Loop passes instantly — you see rotatable tiles and a pattern, and you just know. If we find ourselves hunting for instructions, that is a mark against it. The visual should teach the rule. We will write a how-to-play section on the game's page anyway, but needing it to start is a failure.
3. Does it survive one-handed on a phone?
Most of our players are on mobile, so we test there first, not last. We hold the phone in one hand and try to play with a thumb. Tiny tap targets, buttons in the corners, anything that needs two precise hands — these get sent back. A game like Stack Tower 3D works because the entire interaction is a single tap anywhere on the screen. That is the bar for a mobile-first browser game.
4. Does it keep your progress?
We close the tab mid-game and reopen it. If the game forgot where we were, that is a problem we fix before listing. There is no good reason for a browser game to lose your state between sessions — local storage handles it for free — and a game that drops your progress is telling you it does not respect your time. We treat saved state as a requirement, not a feature.
5. Does it get harder the right way?
We play far enough to see how difficulty scales. The cheap way to make a game harder is to make the controls flakier — smaller hitboxes, faster timers, less fair inputs. The honest way is to grow the puzzle while keeping the controls steady. Slide Block Jam does it honestly: the swipe never changes, the board just gets meaner. If a game gets "hard" by getting unfair, we either fix the curve or drop it.
6. Is anything misleading?
This is the final pass and the one we are strictest about. No fake buttons, no "download" prompts that are not downloads, no popups dressed up as gameplay, nothing that tries to trick a tap. A game has to be exactly what it looks like. We would rather list fewer games than list one that wastes or misleads a player, and that principle is the whole reason we curate instead of listing everything.
Why most games never make the cut
Put together, this checklist is the reason our library is small. Plenty of perfectly functional games fail one item — a three-second logo intro, a corner button, a lost save — and one failure is usually enough. We would rather you open any game on the site and trust it works than scroll past a hundred that mostly do. If you want to see what survived the process, the puzzle and arcade collections are the best place to start.