Why none of our games need a download
Every game on M698 is a single self-contained page. Here is what that decision costs us and why we keep making it.
When we started building M698 the easy route was an emulator platform: upload existing ROMs, wrap them in a player, and ship a catalogue of a thousand games in a fortnight. We did not take it, and the reason is the first ten seconds.
A downloadable or emulated game asks the player to trust you before they have any evidence. There is a store page, a permission prompt, a progress bar. Every one of those is a place where a visitor leaves. A browser game that loads in under a second asks for nothing except a tap.
The cost of that decision is real. Every game has to be written from scratch, which means eighteen games is eighteen small engineering projects rather than eighteen file uploads. Controls have to be rebuilt for touch, mouse and keyboard on every single title. There is no shared engine to hide behind.
What we get in return is a catalogue you can actually try. Scroll, tap, play, leave. No install, no account, no marketing pop-up before the fun starts. We think that trade is obviously correct, and we will keep making it.