When people think of gaming platforms with 100 million monthly players, they think of PlayStation, Xbox, or Nintendo. They do not typically think of a self-funded, 65-person company based in Amsterdam.

Yet that is exactly where Poki sits today, operating at a scale that rivals some of the biggest names in the industry, built without a single round of venture capital. The company launched in 2014 with a simple premise: the browser was an underserved gaming platform, and players deserved a better experience on it.

The gaming industry largely disagreed. Web gaming carried a reputation as a relic, the graveyard of Flash games and banner ads, a channel that serious developers and players had long since abandoned for mobile app stores and consoles. That perception, it turns out, created an opening.

The Web Was a Tooling Problem, Not a Marketing Problem

What co-founders Michiel van Amerongen and Bas Moeys understood early was that convincing developers to take the web seriously was not a marketing problem. It was a tooling problem.

Mobile had App Store infrastructure, analytics, monetization frameworks, and user acquisition pipelines baked in. The web had none of that. Developers looking at the browser as a publishing channel were essentially being asked to build their own foundation before they could build their game.

If Poki was going to change that, it had to become the foundation itself, making publishing on the browser feel as viable and as lucrative as publishing anywhere else.

Laying the Infrastructure From Scratch

That meant assembling a developer toolkit compatible with virtually every major game engine on the market. It meant creating a Playtest feature that routes unreleased games to real players without those players knowing they are testing anything, delivering session recordings, behavioral data, and console logs back to developers within hours.

It also meant giving studios access to multiplayer networking and backend data storage, capabilities most teams at that scale could never afford to build themselves. Poki built the foundation that developers needed to succeed on the web, and the audience came with it.

A Billion Gameplays a Month

The results speak for themselves. In 2025, Poki hit several milestones that would have seemed far-fetched when the company launched a decade ago:

  • 625 million players visited the platform across desktop and mobile
  • 1 billion gameplays in a single month
  • 227 new games added to its curated library
  • Top developer partners generating up to €1 million annually

Perhaps the most telling sign of what the platform has built is not its biggest partners but its smallest. Solo developers working alone have launched games on Poki and generated enough revenue to sustain themselves entirely from web gaming.

Larger studios have found it a meaningful additional revenue stream too, with companies like SYBO bringing established titles such as Subway Surfers to millions of new web players, without the user acquisition costs that define mobile publishing.

The Ad Model That Changed the Equation

The monetization model underpinning all of this centers on Rewarded Video, an ad format where players opt in to watch an ad in exchange for an in-game benefit like extra lives or currency.

It is a familiar mechanic from mobile, but Poki refined how it gets deployed on the web, building clear guidelines around placement, reward value, and player experience that keep engagement high and ad fatigue low.

Short ads that appear between rounds are also placed strategically, not after every session but at natural breaks that feel far less intrusive than the formats players are used to elsewhere.

When a player chooses to watch an ad because the reward feels worth it, everybody wins. The player stays in the game longer, the developer earns more, and the advertiser reaches someone who is actually paying attention. It is a meaningfully different dynamic from the interruptive formats that gave web gaming its bad reputation in the first place.

The Hottest Platform No One Saw Coming

For years, the prevailing assumption was that web ad rates could not compete with mobile app stores. That assumption is becoming harder to defend.

Bloomberg recently labeled web gaming the industry’s hottest new platform, and Poki’s 2025 numbers suggest the momentum is real. The platform grew from 50 to 65 full-time employees last year and took home the Best in Business award at the Dutch Game Awards, recognition that a bootstrapped Dutch company had built something world-class in a space dominated by trillion-dollar ecosystems.

Built to Win Together

The goal for 2026, according to van Amerongen, is not rapid expansion but deliberate quality. More players than ever are arriving on Poki, which makes the platform’s relationship with its developers more important, not less.

Every developer relationship is built around a long-term revenue share rather than a one-time licensing fee. When a game does well, both the developer and Poki benefit. When a developer improves their game based on Playtest data, both sides win again. It is a model that aligns incentives in a way the app store ecosystem rarely does.

That mutual investment is ultimately what separates Poki from a simple distribution channel. The platform goes beyond hosting games, building the kind of long-term partnerships that give developers a reason to keep investing in their web presence, and give Poki a reason to keep investing in the tools that make that possible.