There are thousands of free HTML5 games on the open web. Most of the big portals try to list as many as they can find. The pitch is volume — search for 'puzzle' and you get five hundred results. The user picks something, plays it, and the portal earns ad impressions on the way in and out. This works as a business model. It does not work as a service to anyone who actually wants to play a game.
The cost of volume
When a site lists five hundred puzzle games, almost none of them are good. The math is unkind: if even one percent of HTML5 games are worth playing, that is five out of five hundred. The user has to dig through forty-nine bad ones to find the one they like. The reward for the portal is the same regardless of which game gets clicked, so the portal has no incentive to surface the good ones.
The result is a user experience that wears people down. You open the portal hoping to play something. You leave the portal feeling like you wasted thirty minutes browsing. The games themselves were not the problem — the catalogue around them was.
Curation is just choosing what to leave out
Curating a games library is not glamorous. Most of the work is saying no. We try ten games, keep one, write the next month's batch. The discipline is harder than it sounds because there is always a temptation to keep games that are 'okay' — playable, technically working, not embarrassing. Okay is the enemy of good. A library of okay games is a directory; a library of only good games is a portal.
When you cut the okay games out, the catalogue shrinks fast. H5 Bros has 37 games at the time of writing. That number will grow, but slowly. We would rather have 50 games we are confident about than 500 we cannot stand behind.
What 'good' means to us
We are not making a critical case for art games. The bar is much simpler: a game makes the cut if a real player, picking it for a real five-minute break, ends the session glad they played. That is it. Not 'impressed by the design'. Not 'thought it was clever'. Glad they played.
This rules out a lot. Pay-to-win games are out. Games that bury the mechanic under a tutorial wall are out. Games that work poorly on phones are out — most of our audience plays on phones. Games with audio that cannot be muted are out. Games that crash on the first level are obviously out, but you would be surprised.
The trade-off
The honest trade-off of curation is that some people will not find what they want here. Someone looking for a specific niche game — a specific kart racer, a specific tower defense — will not find it. We do not have everything. We have what we picked. For that audience, the big directories are better. For everyone else, hopefully, we are.
What we owe the player
When a player opens a curated portal, they are trading away choice for trust. The deal is: we pick well, you do not have to dig. That deal breaks the moment we lower the bar — add a game we are not sure about, list a category we cannot fill with confidence, chase trends instead of quality. We try not to break the deal. It is the only thing that distinguishes a portal from a directory.