Why we make games for the browser instead of the app store
When we started Zada Games, the obvious path was an app. Everyone has an app store, everyone knows how to install one. We went the other way, and this post explains why. It is partly about players, partly about where we come from, and partly about what kind of games we want to make.
The install is the enemy
Every step between "that looks fun" and "I'm playing" loses people. Tap the link, wait for the store, tap install, wait for the download, accept permissions, find the icon, open it, sit through a splash screen. Somewhere in that chain most people give up. A browser game has one step: tap the link. Our home page to gameplay is a single tap, and that is not an accident; it is the whole design.
This matters most on the phones our players actually own. A lot of our audience is on mid-range Android devices with storage that is always nearly full. Asking for 80 MB of space is asking them to delete photos. Asking for nothing is easy to say yes to.
Small is a feature
Because nothing is installed, everything must load fast on mobile data. That forces discipline. Doodle Wheels, including its physics engine, is under 150 KB, smaller than most single photos. Hand Fighter's game code is even smaller; the only heavy part is the hand-tracking model, which is a few megabytes and is only fetched when you actually turn the camera on. Choose keyboard or touch controls and you never download it.
Both games draw everything with code rather than image files. Every fighter, every hill and every star-shaped wheel is described as shapes and colours, not pictures. It is more work up front, but it is why the games load in a second and why they look sharp on any screen size.
Nothing to sign up for
We don't ask for an account because we don't need one. Progress like your best Doodle Wheels level is saved in your own browser. Online matches use a 4-letter room code instead of friend lists. Hand Fighter's camera feed never leaves your device: the hand tracking runs locally, and the only thing sent to your opponent is your inputs. Our privacy policy is short because there is not much to say.
How the games stay free
The site carries ads on the pages around the games, never inside the games themselves. That pays for the domain, the relay servers that let phones on strict mobile networks connect to each other for online play, and the time it takes to build the next game. We chose this over paid downloads because a price tag is just another install step, and over in-game purchases because we don't want to design games that are more fun if you pay.
What the browser can't do, and what it can
We won't pretend the browser is perfect. It can't run in the background, it can't send notifications without permission, and phone browsers are picky about camera access. In exchange it gives us something app stores can't: the same game, the same code, on every phone and every laptop, updated the moment we push a fix. When we improved Doodle Wheels' car physics, every player had the new version on their next visit. Nobody had to update anything.
It also lets us build games that only make sense on the web. Hand Fighter exists because a laptop with a webcam is already a motion controller if you write the right code. A room code you can paste into a chat is a better invitation than a friend request.
Where this goes
Every game we release will follow the same rules: one tap to play, free, light enough for mobile data, and honest about what it collects. If you have a phone and a link, you have everything you need. That is the whole pitch, and we intend to keep it that way as the catalogue grows.