Open a game page on this site and you will not find a game running. You will find a cover image and a play button. Press it and the game appears immediately, but until you do, nothing has been requested from the company that hosts it.
This is not a loading screen and it is not a design flourish. It is the one technical decision on this site we are most confident about, and it is worth explaining what it actually changes.
What an embedded frame does the moment it exists
A browser game on a portal is almost never hosted by the portal. It lives on the game provider's servers and is displayed through an iframe, a window in our page onto someone else's.
The important thing about that window is that it is a full page load on the other end. The instant the frame exists in the document, before you have clicked anything, your browser has:
- made a request to the provider's servers, which reveals your IP address, your browser and operating system, and the page you were on when the request went out;
- downloaded the game, which for a 3D title can be several megabytes;
- allowed the provider to set cookies and local storage on their own domain;
- allowed any advertising the game itself carries to begin initialising.
None of that requires your consent, your attention, or any interest in the game. It happens because the frame is on the page.
On a portal where every game page auto-loads its embed, browsing the catalogue for ten minutes means announcing yourself to the game host on every page you look at, whether or not you played anything.
What holding it back changes
Making the frame conditional on a click changes three things at once, which is unusual for a decision this small.
It makes browsing private by default. Look at fifteen game pages, play one, and the provider learns about one. The other fourteen visits were between you and us. Nothing is stored on your device by a third party unless you asked for a game.
It makes the consent question honest. If you are somewhere that requires consent before non-essential third-party storage, a page that has already loaded a third-party frame before asking has answered the question on your behalf. A page that loads nothing until you act has not.
It makes pages fast. A game page becomes text, one image and some CSS. It renders almost immediately, even on a bad connection, and the multi-megabyte download only happens for the game you actually chose. On mobile data this is a straightforwardly better experience.
What it costs
One click. That is the whole cost, and we think it is a fair trade for the three things above.
There is a second, subtler cost worth naming: an auto-loading embed can start downloading while you read the description, so the game is ready by the time you look up. Behind a play button, the download starts when you press it. For a large 3D game on a slow connection you may wait a couple of seconds you would not otherwise have waited.
We decided that a predictable couple of seconds, on the one game you chose, is better than an unannounced download on every page you glance at. We are also comfortable being wrong about that in individual cases in a way we would not be comfortable being wrong about the privacy default.
The related decision
There is a companion choice worth mentioning, because it comes from the same instinct.
We do not display star ratings or play counts anywhere on this site. Not because they are unhelpful — a genuine rating is very helpful — but because we do not yet collect that data from visitors, and the only way to show a number today would be to invent one.
It is remarkably common to see a new games site displaying "4.8 stars, 72,000 plays" next to a comment section reading "no comments yet." Those two things cannot both be true. Somebody decided the number looked better than the blank, and every other number on the site becomes a little less believable as a result.
So there is no rating on our pages. When we have real data, there will be, and we will say where it came from. Until then the pages carry what we can actually stand behind: a description we wrote, a control list we checked against the running game, and the name of the network the game is licensed through.
A play button instead of an autoplay frame, and a blank space instead of an invented number, are the same decision applied twice.