So you've followed a tutorial or two and created an HTML game — that's great! Game distribution provides all you need to know about the ways you can distribute your newly created game into the wild — including hosting it yourself online, submitting it to open marketplaces, and submitting it to closed ones like Google Play or the iOS App Store.

Developing and finishing the game is not enough. You have to let the world know that you have made something interesting available, which people will enjoy playing. There are many Game promotion techniques — many of them free — so even if you're struggling to make a living as an indie dev with zero budget you can still do a lot to let people know about your great new game. Promoting the game helps a lot in monetizing it later on too, so it's important to do it effectively.

When you spend your time building, publishing and promoting your game, you will at some point consider earning money out of it. Game monetization is essential to anyone who considers their game development work a serious endeavour on the path to becoming an independent game developer able to make a living, so read on and see what your options are. The technology is mature enough; it's just a matter of choosing the right approach.

Building games with HTML gives you extra advantages, such as:

The technology itself is multiplatform, so you can write the code once and target multiple devices. This can range from low-end smartphones or tablets, through laptops and desktop computers, to smart TVs, watches or even a fridge if it can handle a modern enough browser.

You don't need to have separate teams to work on the same title targeting different platforms with only one code base to worry about. You can spend more time and money on Promotion and Monetization .

You don't have to wait several days to have your game's code updated. If your user finds a bug, you can quickly fix it, update the system and refresh the game on your server to provide players with the updated code almost instantly.

You don't have to tell people to search for your game in an app store with HTML games. You can just send them a direct URL to access the game, which they can then click to play the game right away without the need to use third party plugins or download and install a large package. Bear in mind that downloading the game might still take a bit of time depending on the size of the game and your network speed. In any case, it's a lot easier to promote the game if you can drive traffic directly where you want it and don't have to jump through lots of hoops to play.

The vast majority of the traffic we are interested in — people playing HTML games — comes from mobile devices so that's something you will have to focus on if you truly want to succeed. Mobile devices are where HTML technology can truly shine and show its advantages. There's no Flash, and HTML is fully multiplatform.

Trying to compete with desktop games directly is very difficult. You can put your HTML games into the same arena (see Native desktop , later on) and you should because it's good to diversify the platforms you support, but you have to remember that developers creating desktop games have years of experience, great tools and stable distribution channels. Many HTML games will target different market segments than native desktop games, e.g. simple time killer games to be played while on the move rather than huge immersive experiences. Such games are often designed to be played with two, or even one finger, so you can hold the device, play the game and be able to use the second hand for whatever you currently need.

Saying this, desktop platforms can be used for distribution quite easily with the availability of wrappers that can help you prepare native builds of your game see Packaging games . It's also nice to provide desktop controls for your games even if you're mostly targeting mobile. Players are enjoying your games on any platform available, and desktop is one of them. Plus, it is usually easier to build and test the game first on desktop, and then move on to debugging mobile.

There are three main options when it comes to publishing a game:

• Self-hosting
• Publishers
• Stores

Remember that the name of your game should be unique enough to be quickly promoted later on, but also catchy enough, so people don't forget it.

If you are a front-end developer, you may already know what to do. An HTML game is just another website. You can upload it to a remote server, grab a catchy domain name, and host it yourself.

If you want to make money out of game dev, you should secure your source code one way or another against people who could easily take it and sell it as their own. You can concatenate and minify the code to make it smaller and uglify it so it's a lot harder to reverse engineer your game. Another good measure to take is to provide an online demo if you're planning on packaging it and selling it in a closed store like iTunes or Steam.

If you're working on a side project just for fun, then leaving the source open will benefit those who would like to learn from what you've created. You don't even have to worry about looking for a hosting provider as it's possible to host games on GitHub Pages . You'll get free hosting, version control and possible contributors if your project is interesting enough.

As the name may suggest, publishers can handle the publishing of your game for you. Whether you should go that way or not depends on what your plan is for having your game distributed: Do you want to send it wherever possible, or do you want to restrict its presence to those who've bought an exclusive license ? It's up to you. Consider various options, experiment and conclude. Publishers will be explained in more detail in the monetization article.

There are also independent portals collecting interesting games like HTML5Games.com , GameArter.com , MarketJS.com , GameFlare , GameDistribution.com , Poki , or CrazyGames where you can send your game in and it will get some natural promotion because of the big traffic those sites attract. Some of these take your files and host them on their server, whereas others only link to your website or embed your game on their site. Such exposure may just provide promotion for your game, or if you have adverts shown beside your game (or other money making options) it may also provide monetization.

You can also upload and publish your game directly to different types of stores, or marketplaces. To do that you'll have to prepare and package it to a build format specific for every app ecosystem you want to target it at. See Marketplaces — distribution platforms for more details of what marketplace types are available.

Let's see what the available options are regarding the marketplaces/stores available for different platforms and operating systems.

The best platforms for HTML games are Web-based stores. You can prepare games for web stores by adding a manifest file and other data, such as resources, in a zipped package. Not many modifications of the game itself are required.

• The Chrome Web Store is also an attractive option — again, having a manifest file ready, zipping your game and filling in the online submission form is about all that's required.

When it comes to the mobile market, there's the Apple App Store for iOS, Google Play for Android and all the rest of the competition. Native stores are already filled with established devs selling great games, so you have to be talented and lucky to get noticed.

• The iOS App Store is quite hard to get into as there are strict requirements games have to meet, and you'll have to wait a week or two to get accepted. Plus, it's the most prominent mobile store, with hundreds of thousands of apps, so it's extremely hard to stand out from the crowd.
• Google Play's requirements are less strict, so the store is polluted with low quality games. It's still quite hard to be noticed there as the number of apps submitted daily is huge. It's harder to earn money here too — most of the paid games from iOS are published as free games on Android, with monetization coming from in-app purchases (IAPs) or ads.
• Other stores for native mobile platforms like Windows Phone or Blackberry are working hard to get a piece of the cake, and are way behind the competition. It can be good to submit your game there as it will be a lot easier to be noticed.

If you're looking for more information about the different types of app stores you can check the List of mobile software distribution platforms article on Wikipedia.

To broaden your audience you can hit the desktop ecosystem with your HTML games too — just remember all the popular AAA games that take most of the market share, and think carefully about whether this suits your strategy. To do the desktop thing properly you should support all three operating systems: Windows, macOS and Linux. The biggest desktop store for games is definitely Steam — indie developers can get on Steam via the Steam Direct program. Remember that you have to deal with the cross-platform issues yourself by uploading separate versions for different platforms.

After you've covered Steam, there's plenty of buzz around initiatives like Humble Bundle where the most popular indie games get presented to a broader audience. It's more like an excellent promotional opportunity than a way to earn a lot of money, however, as the prices paid for the games in a bundle are usually quite low.

The web is the first and the best choice for HTML games, but if you want to reach a broader audience and distribute your game in a closed ecosystem, you still can do that by packaging it. The good thing is that you don't need a few separate teams working on the same game for different platforms — you can build it once and use tools like Phonegap or CocoonIO to package the game for native stores. The resulting packages are usually pretty reliable, but you should still test them and be on the lookout for small issues or bugs to fix.

There are various tools to choose from depending on your skills, preferred frameworks or target platforms. It's all about picking the best tool for your particular task.

• Ejecta — a tool specifically for packaging games created with the ImpactJS framework for iOS, built by the ImpactJS author. It provides seamless integration with ImpactJS, but it supports only one framework and app store.
• NW.js — formerly known as Node-Webkit, this is the first choice when it comes to building a desktop game that works on Windows, Mac and Linux. The distributions are packaged with the WebKit engine to provide rendering on any platform.

Other alternative tools are:

• Intel XDK — an exciting alternative, similar to CocoonIO.
• Electron — known as Atom Shell — is an open-sourced and cross-platform tool from GitHub.
• Manifold.js — this tool from the Microsoft team can create native distributions of HTML games from iOS, Android, and Windows.

Distribution is the way to give the world access to your game. There are many options available and there's no single good answer as to which is the best. When you've published the game it's time to focus on promotion — letting people know your game exists. Without promotion, they wouldn't even be able to learn about it and play it.

Taking part in competitions will not only level up your gamedev skills and let you meet new devs to befriend and learn from — and it will also get you involved in the community. If you make a good game for a competition and win some prizes in the process your game will automatically be promoted by the organizers and other attendees. You'll be rich and famous, or so they say.

Many great games get started as a quick, sloppy demo submitted to a competition. If both the idea and the execution are good enough, you will succeed. Plus competitions generally require games to follow a mandatory theme, so you can get creative around a theme if you are stuck for ideas.

You should definitely create your own website containing all the information about your games, so people can see what you've worked on. The more information you can include the better — you should include screenshots, description, trailer, press kit, requirements, available platforms, support details and more. You'll get bonus points for allowing your users to directly play your games online — at least in demo form. Also, you should do some work on SEO to allow people to find your games more easily.

You should also blog about everything related to your gamedev activities. Write about your development process, nasty bugs you encounter, funny stories, lessons learned, and the ups and downs of being a game developer. Continually publishing information about your games will help educate others, increase your reputation in the community, and further improve SEO. A further option is to publish monthly reports that summarize all your progress — it helps you see what you've accomplished throughout the month and what's still left to do, and it keeps reminding people that your game is coming out soon — building buzz is always good.

While you can create your website from scratch, there are also tools that can help make the process easier. ManaKeep is a website builder made for indie game developers and provides a great starting point to create your website. Presskit() is a press kit builder that helps you create a press page to share with the media.

Your social media presence is very important. The #gamedev hashtag can help find friends and allow you to engage with the community and help other devs in need. Honesty is key and you should be authentic; nobody likes boring press releases or pushy advertisements. When the time comes, your community will help you spread the word about your shiny new game!

Keep an eye on gamers who stream on YouTube and Twitch, and be active on forums such as HTML5GameDevs.com . Share your news and answer questions so that people will value what you're doing and will know that you're trustworthy. Remember to not be too pushy when it comes to telling everyone about your games — you're not a walking advertisement.

Grow your audience by talking to them, sharing tips, offering discounts, giving away prizes in competitions, or just complaining at the weather or buggy browser you have to deal with. Be generous, be yourself and be there for others, and you'll be treated with respect.

Using game portals is mostly concerned with monetization , but if you're not planning to sell licenses to allow people to purchase your game and intend to implement adverts or in-app purchases instead, promoting your game across free portals can be effective.

There are a number of different game portals to which you can send your games for publication. Some portals have their own APIs that allow you to authorize users, save their progress and process in-app purchases. You can also sell a full version of the game from inside your browser demo version, which will be a great move considering high competition, some developers even manage to make full browser versions. Most portals offer revenue share deals or will buy nonexclusive licenses.

Free portals offer traffic, but only the best ones are popular enough to generate revenues from advertisements on in-app purchases. On the other hand, they are a perfect tool to make games visible to a broader audience if you have no budget and limited time.

You can try and reach the press about your game, but bear in mind that they get a tonne of requests like this every single day, so be humble and patient if they don't answer right away, and be polite when talking to them. Be sure to check first if they are dealing with specific genres of games or platforms, so you don't send them something that is not relevant to them in the first place. If you're honest with your approach and your game is good, then you've got more of a chance of success.

If you want to learn more about the etiquette of contacting the press you should check out How To Contact Press - a great guide from Pixel Prospector.

It's good to share your knowledge with other devs — after all, you probably learned a thing or two from online articles, so you take the time to pay that knowledge forward. Talking or writing about something you achieved or problems you overcame is something people would be interested in. Also, you can use your own game as an example, especially in a tutorial when you're showing how to do something you've implemented already . That way everyone benefits — people learn new skills, your game gets promoted, and if you're lucky you can even get paid for writing a tutorial if it's good enough.

There are portals like Tuts+ Game Development which will be more than happy if you write for them - they pay for the content, but not all topic ideas will be accepted. When writing a tutorial remember to focus on delivering something valuable to the reader. They want to learn something - offer your expertise and use your game as a case study. Focus on one aspect and try to explain it throughout and in detail. Also, remember to follow up on discussions in your comments if people have any questions.

If portals you contact are not interested in your content because you don't have any experience yet, try writing tutorials and then publish them on your own blog first. It's the easiest way to train your writing skills on your own.

If you've gone through all the options listed above you can still find new, creative ways to promote your game — events are another good example. Attending events, both local and global, gives you the ability to meet your fans face to face, as well as other members of the development community. Value the fact that they spent their time seeing you.

There are many conferences where you can give a talk explaining some technical difficulties you overcame, or how you implemented specific APIs; again — use your games as examples for that. It's important to focus on the knowledge part and tone down the marketing — devs are sensitive on this matter and you may end up with an angry crowd if you just try to sell them something.

The other event-related option is fairs (or expos) — at such an event you can get a booth among other devs and promote your game to all the attendees passing by. If you do so, try to be unique and original, so you easily stand out from the crowd. Do it the right way and everybody will be talking about you and your game. Having a booth gives you the possibility to interact with your fans directly — besides the promotion part, you can also test new builds of your game on regular people and fix any bugs (or incorporate any feedback) they uncover. You can't imagine what people may come up with when playing your game, and what obvious issues you've missed while spending hours polishing it.

If you're selling the game, then create the ability to distribute promo codes allowing people to access your game for free (or at least a demo or time-limited version), and send them all over the place — to press, YouTubers, as competition prizes, etc. If the game reaches certain people you'll get a free advert to thousands of players. It can boost interest in your game more than anything else if you get lucky.

You can help community grow and promote yourself and your games at the same time. Sending out weekly newsletters and organizing online competitions or local meetups will show others that you're passionate about what you do and that they can rely on you. Then when you need any help they will be there for you.

Any way of promoting your game is good. You have a lot of options to choose from with most of them being free, so it's only about your enthusiasm and available time. Sometimes you have to spend more time promoting a game than actually developing it. Remember that it's no use to have the best game in the world if no one knows it exists.

Now, let's get on with that monetization part, and earn something for a living.

The first, most obvious choice that may come to your mind might be selling the games the way it is done for huge AAA titles — with a fixed, up front price. Even though the digital market is key and you don't need to print covers and put your game in a physical store in boxes, to earn decent money on selling your games for a fixed price you have to invest your time and money in marketing. Only the best games will break even or earn more than they cost to make, and you still need a lot of luck for that.

How much you charge for your game depends on the market, quality of your game and a lot of other small factors. An arcade iOS title can be sold for 0.99 USD, but a longer RPG-style desktop game on Steam can cost 20 USD; both prices are OK. You have to follow the market and do your own research — learning from your mistakes quickly is important.

Instead of having people pay for your game up front, you can offer a free game with in-app purchases (IAPs.) In this case the game can be acquired without spending a dime — give the game to the players, but offer in-game currency, bonuses or benefits for real money. Specific examples can include bonus levels, better weapons or spells, or refilling the energy needed to play. Designing a good IAP system is an art of its own.

Remember that you need thousands of downloads of your game to make IAPs effective — only a small fraction of players will actually pay for IAPs. How small? It varies, but around one person in every thousand is about average. The more people that play your game, the higher the chance someone will pay, so your earnings heavily depend on your promotion activities.

Games that feature IAPs are often referred to a freemium — a freemium game can be acquired and played for free, but you can pay for extra (premium) features, virtual goods or other benefits. The word itself acquired negative connotations after big companies focused on creating games, the main purpose of which was to get as much money from the players as possible instead of delivering a fun experience. The worst cases were when you could use real money to pay for getting advantages over other players, or when they restricted access to the next stages of the game unless the players paid. The term "pay to win" was coined and this approach is disliked by many players and devs. If you want to implement IAPs try to add value to the game with something players will enjoy instead of taking it out and then charging for it.

Add-ons and downloadable content are a good way to provide extra value to an already released game, but remember that you'll have to offer decent, entertaining content to attract people to buy it. A totally new set of levels with new characters, weapons and story is a good material for DLC, but to have enough sales the game itself has to be popular, or else there won't be any players interested in spending their hard-earned money on it.

Instead of actively selling the games you can also try to get yourself a passive income — showing adverts and relying on previous activities related to promoting your game may benefit, but your game has to be addictive, which isn't as easy as it sounds. You still need to plan it out, and at some point you'll need a bit of luck too. If your game goes viral and people start sharing it, you can get a lot of downloads and money out of adverts.

There are many companies offering advert systems — you sign up and allow them to show adverts in exchange for a percentage of the earnings. Google AdSense is said to be the most effective one, but it's not designed for games and it's a pretty bad practice to use it for that purpose. Instead of risking of having your account closed and all the money blocked try to use the usual, gamedev targeted portals like LeadBolt . They offer easy to implement systems to show the adverts in your games and split the earnings with you.

Video ads are getting more and more popular, especially in the form of a pre-roll — they are shown at the beginning of your game while it's still loading. And on the topic of where to put the advertisements in your game it really depends on you. It should be as subtle as possible to not annoy the players too much, but visible enough to make them click it or at least take notice. Adding adverts between game sessions on game over screens is a popular approach.

There's an approach that can work as a monetization model on its own, and that's selling licenses for distribution of your game. There are more and more portals interested in showing your games on their websites. They follow various strategies to earn money via your games, but you don't have to worry about all that as selling the license is usually a one-time deal. You get the money and they can get creative with using your game to make money.

Finding publishers might be hard at first — try to look for them at the HTML5 Gamedevs forums . If you're well known they may reach out to you. Most of the deals are done through emails when talking to a dedicated person on the publisher side. Some publisher websites have that information easily available, while some others are harder to find. When reaching a publisher try to be nice and straight to the point — they are busy people.

The exclusive license is a type of license for one publisher — you've built a game and you're selling all the rights to it to a single entity along with the rights to redistribute it — Softgames are an example of such a publisher. You can't sell it again in any form while that publisher has the rights — that's why exclusive deals are worth quite a lot of money. How much exactly? It depends on the quality of the game, it's genre, its publisher, and many others, but usually it will be something between 2000 and 5000 USD. Once you've sold an exclusive license you can forget about promoting that particular game as you won't earn more, so go into such a deal only if you're sure it's profitable enough.

This approach is less strict — you can sell a license to multiple publishers. This is the most popular approach as with every new publisher (and they are constantly showing up) you can sell your games on non-exclusive terms. Remember that with this license the publisher can't redistribute it further — it's often called a site-locked deal as they buy the right to publish the game on their own given portal. The usual cost of a non-exclusive license is around 500 USD.

There's also an option to get a passive, monthly revenue via a subscription deal. Instead of getting a one-time payment you can get a small amount of money per game, per month — it can be something around 20-50 USD per month, per game. It's normally up to you if you want to get all the money in a lump sum or get it per month. Remember that it can be cancelled, so it's not an indefinitely working solution.

You can implement advertisements in your game on your own and try to find the traffic to earn a bit, but you can also do a revenue share deal with a publisher. They will take care of driving the traffic and will split the earnings — usually in a 70/30 or 50/50 deal, collected per month.

Remember that many new, low quality publishers will want to get your game for ad revenue instead of licensing because it will be cheaper for them and you might end up with earnings around 2 USD per game for the whole deal. Be careful when dealing with new publishers — sometimes it's better to lower the license cost for a known one rather than risking fraud with an unknown publisher for more money.

Publishers taking your games for revenue share, and/or licensing may require implementing their own APIs, which could take extra work, so consider that in your rates too.

You can sell rights to use your game for branding, or do it yourself. In the first case it's almost like non-exclusive licensing, but the client will usually buy rights for the code and implement their own graphics. In the second case it's like a freelance deal, but you're reusing the code and adding graphics provided by the client, sometimes implementing them as they instruct you. As an example if you've got a game where a player taps items of food, you could change the food to the client's products to give them advertising. Prices in this model vary greatly depending on the brand, client, and amount of work you put in.

There are other ways you can earn money when building HTML games, and it doesn't even have to be game-related.

If you're a graphic designer, you can sell the assets from the games you've created, or something brand new exclusively for that purpose at online shops like Envato Market . It's not much, but if you're a known designer it can be an extra passive stream of income.

It is possible to write articles about your games and even get paid for them. Game promotion and monetization at the same time is a win-win, and if you don't abuse it with too much advertising the readers will enjoy reading them and as well as learning a thing or two. If you focus on sharing the knowledge first and use your games just as the examples it should be OK. Check out Tuts+ Game Development or similar websites for writing opportunities.

You can sell t-shirts, stickers or other gadgets — some devs make more money from the merchandise than from the games themselves, but it only works on very popular and recognizable games like Angry Birds. Still, it could be another small stream of passive income. The more diversified your earnings are, the better your business stability.

When all else fails you can try putting a donate button on your game's page and asking for support from the community. Sometimes it works, but only if the player knows you and feels that it will help you in your situation. That's why carefully managing your community is so important. It worked with the js13kGames competition — every participant got a free t-shirt, and some even gave back a few bucks to help keep it going in years to come.

There are many ways to earn money — everything that applies to the "normal" AAA gaming world can be, more or less, applied to casual HTML games. You might however also focus on selling licenses, doing branding, or earning on a revenue share basis from the advertisements. It's totally up to you which path you're going to follow.