Answers for developers, publishers and site owners on monetizing and distributing web games.
337 posts
Under current US Copyright Office guidance, AI-generated code or art is copyrightable only where a human author contributed sufficient expressive elements - editing, arranging or combining AI output creatively. Prompting alone does not create a copyrightable work, and this is an evolving area, not settled case law.
You cannot fully stop it if the score is computed and sent from the browser: any client-side value can be edited before it reaches the leaderboard. Reduce risk with server-side validation, sanity checks on submitted values, rate limits, and by treating portal SDK leaderboards as convenience features, not anti-cheat.
For most browser games, the cheapest setup is a lightweight WebSocket relay running on pay-per-use serverless compute (e.g. Cloudflare Durable Objects) rather than a fleet of dedicated game servers. Add an open-source backend like Nakama only once you need matchmaking, chat and persistent accounts at scale.
Only if the song was generated while subscribed to a paid Suno plan. Paid-tier output carries commercial use rights, so it can go into a game that runs ads. Free-tier songs are non-commercial and cannot be monetized, including via ad revenue.
Implement cloud saves and leaderboards without running your own server by integrating a managed backend-as-a-service or a platform SDK. Solutions like GamePush, Supabase, Nakama, or portal data modules handle remote database storage, user authentication, and score ranking entirely through client-side API calls, removing the need to manage infrastructure.
GitHub Pages and Cloudflare Pages are the two reliable free static hosts for HTML5 game builds. Portals such as Poki, itch.io and GameDistribution also host the build for you once you upload it, with their own iframe or CDN rules.
A backend is needed once data must be trusted, shared across devices, or synced between players in real time: authoritative leaderboards, cross-device saves, in-game purchases, or multiplayer. A purely local single-player game with client-side scores can run with no server at all.
Use localStorage for small saves (settings, level number, simple JSON under a few hundred KB) and IndexedDB for larger or structured data (inventories, replay data, many records). Both are per-origin, live in the browser, and can be cleared by the user or the browser itself - they are not backup or cross-device storage.
Ask each portal how it identifies its iframe (usually a query parameter on the game URL, sometimes the referrer) and check it once at load with a small switch, so one build can adjust ad calls or branding per portal without shipping separate builds.
Web game portals enforce strict technical standards covering initial load speed, compressed package file size, frame rate stability on low-end hardware, audio autoplay compliance, and proper SDK integration. Reviewers test builds on modest devices to confirm smooth performance, verifying that games load quickly without blocking the browser thread or misbehaving in iframes.