How Pokii Games hosts a title (and what we refuse to ship)

The site is the wrapper, the game is the product

Pokii Games is not a search index of other people’s iframes. Each live title lives under /games/<slug>/ as a self-contained web build — canvas, WebGL, or DOM — served from this domain. When you open Strike Bowling or Hue Vials, you are not bouncing through a third-party portal first. That choice is slower to ship (we have to package and test the build) and better for players (one origin, one privacy policy, one set of controls written on the page).

Google’s publisher rules are blunt about screens that only embed someone else’s content without commentary. We treat that as a product rule, not a legal footnote. A game page has to explain the objective, the fail state, and the input scheme in language that belongs to that title. If we cannot write that paragraph honestly, the build does not go in the grid.

Click-to-play is a performance decision

The homepage grid can show more than two dozen thumbnails. If every card started its engine in the background, a phone on a train would download physics WASM, audio banks, and 3D meshes it never used. The player therefore stays on a still image until you commit. That is why a first tap can take a second: the build is starting, not hanging.

Heavier titles — Ridge Rally’s physics, Cross Runner’s 3D track, Bunker Duel’s artillery world — need that pause more than a tap-to-throw arcade. If a canvas stays black for a long time, refresh once, then try another current browser. We would rather a honest load than a fake “instant” spinner that still stalls.

What has to be true before a slug goes live

A catalog row is not enough. Before a game is linked from the homepage we check four things:

• It actually runs in a current Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge window on this origin.
• The objective is readable in one screen: fill a tank, survive a wave, land a plane, drop a floor.
• Controls can be described without a video. If we need a paragraph of caveats, the build is not ready.
• Credits that shipped with the build stay visible. We do not scrape a title and pretend we painted the sprites.

What we will not add just to look bigger

Empty genre pages (adventure and multiplayer with zero games) do not get a public listing until there is something to play. Thin “coming soon” doors are exactly the inventory Google tells publishers not to monetize.

We also do not duplicate the homepage at /games. The catalog page is grouped by genre with its own intro. Category URLs explain how that shelf plays on this site, then list the matching titles. If a URL exists, it should teach you something the thumbnail did not.

How this relates to ads

Ads, when they are allowed, sit around publisher content — the how-to, the tips, the catalog notes — not instead of it. A screen that is only an embed plus a banner is the definition of low-value inventory in Google’s publisher policies. That is why every game page carries original rules and why this Guides section exists at all.