Poki: How Amsterdam Built a 100M Player Gaming Platform

Poki has 100 million active monthly players. PlayStation Network has 119 million. Poki did that with 65 employees, no external investment, and a browser. No app store. No investor cheques. No VC. A product that is wanted, and a platform that devs want to use.

The Company Nobody Saw Coming

A brutal 2025 for the gaming industry. Big studios are laying off staff, publishers are merging, and the mobile market is cooling. Despite all this, there's a team of 65 based in Amsterdam that just posted the best growth figures on the web gaming market. Poki, a web gaming platform co-founded by Michiel van Amerongen and Sebastian Moeys, attracted 625 million people on both desktop and mobile, registered over 1 billion plays in a single month, and has 100 million monthly active users playing their games. All of that from a team that hasn't taken any VC funding. Bloomberg identified web gaming as the "hottest new platform" on the market in 2025, and Poki is what kick-started that discussion.

Who Founded Poki and Why It Started

Poki was founded in Amsterdam in 2013 and launched on the platform in 2014. Its co-founders are Michiel van Amerongen and Sebastiaan Moeys. Both founders had experience in digital media and online publishing, but not in traditional game development. Their initial observation was simple yet counterintuitive. Mobile and console gaming were the space to be. That's where the money was. That's where the talent was. That's where the eyeballs were. Browser gaming – the format that introduced millions to video games in the 2000s – had been dismissed as a dead medium. Michiel and Sebastiaan didn't believe it was.

They just believed it had been overlooked. No download. No signup. No friction. Play anytime. Any place. Instant access on any device running a browser. It was a huge audience. Its competitors weren't thinking about it. Poki was created to grab that audience before the rest of the world had a chance to notice how big it really was. Michiel van Amerongen describes the mission as: to build the #1 playground on the internet, where everyone can play games for free, instantly.

The Controversial Stat That Changes How You Think About Web Gaming

This is the figure that causes many a hand-wringing session in the gaming industry. Poki gets 100 million monthly active players. PlayStation Network gets 119 million. Poki has joined PlayStation Network, being spoken about in the same breath. One has to wonder what sort of feeling it induces in those who have long decried browser games as a dying category where children's entertainment sites and flash games (with an uncertain future) were to be found. That perception could not have been more incorrect, and it's the numbers that attest to that. According to the Dutch Games Association's 2024 report on the Dutch gaming industry, the industry saw average yearly revenue growth of 10.5% between 2021 and 2023, with overall revenue reaching 763 million euros. Poki is not merely a success story; it is evidence of the severe underestimation of a category.

How Poki Actually Works: The Platform Model

Poki isn't a game developer-it's a marketplace that matches developers with players. But it doesn't function as a purely passive distributor like the App Store or Google Play. Poki plays an active role in the development of a game, rather than just a passive distribution tool. The company collaborates with over 600 developers on over 1500 of its curated games, publishing just one game per day in order to maintain quality control and keep the playing field accessible for small developers.

That one-game-per-day rule remains one of the most critical product decisions Poki has ever made. It creates artificial scarcity, ensures quality, and allows new titles true prominence instead of being lost amongst a catalogue of thousands of existing games. On the App Store or Google Play, discoverability relies heavily on marketing dollars. On Poki, a solo developer stands on a relatively equal playing field with large studios, since its algorithms take average time on the game, and conversion to play, over marketing dollars. That's what gives Poki its structural advantage over any other web-gaming platform and makes its marketplace truly unique. Money isn't what buys exposure; quality is.

What Poki Does for Indie Developers That Nobody Else Does

It's actually the developer side of Poki's story that's a lot more impressive than the player side. If you'd asked about developer earnings 5 years ago from Poki, it was $50,000 a year from Poki, the figure quoted is now as much as $1,000,000 per year in the Netherlands Games Association's 2024 report. That's a 10x revenue increase over the same platform over the last 5 years for a developer. This is achieved through Poki's true partnership model and technical support: When a game publisher is trying to submit a game to Poki, they are not just going to upload their file and wait.

They're going to be guided through some optimization, feedback, and development performance improvement work with the Poki team before their game is made live. Poki also has a track record of successfully getting games noticed: 1,018 games on Poki reached over 1 million plays in 2025. This number is definitely not a coincidence; this represents games that are gaining traction on Poki and are getting players who engage with them. 1018 games that surpassed one million plays this year alone are not an accident. That is the outcome of a platform that is willing to invest in the performance of the game that they host. Revenue generation is based on advertisements. Poki gives a share of ad revenues to the publisher based on their game's performance-no upfront cost, no debt on the publisher's shoulders, no stake in your studio. You keep developing, Poki keeps distributing, and your revenue will grow with game plays.

Poki vs The Competition: An Honest Comparison

The browser gaming platform market is actually a lot more competitive than most people seem to realize, and I thought I would give an honest comparison of the main players that Poki must compete against:

Poki has 100 million players active each month. 1 billion gameplay in one month in 2025. 1,500 curated games from more than 600 developers. A new game is published every day (handpicked carefully), with a real focus on time and engagement with the games rather than the marketing budget. We share our revenues from the advertising with the developers. Winner of Best in Business at Dutch Game Awards 2025. Winner of the Red Dot Design Award for user interface and service design. User experience -players say this is the fastest loading and cleanest web gaming experience there is. Instantly start playing any of the 1000+ games, with no signup or download. It's actually mobile-optimized, not just mobile-friendly. Developers say this is the most helpful partnership they've had with any web platform they've used before. Best for: Indie developers seeking true meritocratic visibility and players that are interested in the fast, premium web-gaming experience.

CrazyGames: Founded in 2013. Belgium. 88.11 million visits per month, authority 88, bounce rate 51.19. Most comparable to Poki by traffic size. Large variety, but less curated than Poki. The developer option exists, but it is less of a partnership than on Poki. User experience is very wide game selection, but not well curated, and play quality varies according to players. A bounce rate of over 51% indicates users aren't finding what they are looking for as often as Poki. Best for: users who want as many choices as possible and developers who want less of a curated barrier.

Coolmath Games gets 14.15M visits per month with an authority score of 76 and a bounce rate of 42.28%. Games available are math and logic games, and are specifically made for learning; they are very well-known with kids in schools across America. They also have a very high standard for security, which is perfect for parents and schools. Their website offers good UX for the players that this is tailored to, which is children and casual players. It isn't a place for you if you are not creating a puzzle or educational game, or if you're looking to market a lot of game varieties. It has a low bounce rate, which suggests a good audience match to their particular style of games. Best suited for: Developers creating family-safe games or educational games.

Newgrounds- the oldest browser game platform, from 1995. Community-based model with votes on game quality, great for creative and experimental indie titles. UI- loved by a loyal community, but feels outdated. Relies heavily on community voting for discovery, making it a bit harder to find what you want. It's a bit more work than searching on Poki or CrazyGames, better for creative audiences rather than mass market gaming. Best for developers who are creating niche and experimental games with a creative focus and are looking for an indie community to support their efforts.

Miniclip – launched in 2001. One of the first big browser gaming sites. Has switched most focus to mobile games after Flash declined. It has dropped the web significantly compared to how big it once was. User experience: apps are good, but the web presence has shrunk quite a bit compared to the past. Users do not turn to it first anymore for browser gaming.

Playhop has 9.8m visits a month and has an authority score of 63. Its bounce rate of 28.77% is the lowest of the competitors in the category, so its audience appears to be extremely engaged. Although smaller-scale than Poki, it has impressive metrics, especially for its size. Unfamiliar name outside of browser gaming, the intended audience is very specific and niche, but this niche engagement rate is very impressive. This site is best suited for those looking for curated, tightly designed games.

The honest truth: Poki's strong suits are scale, the quality of its curation, and how deeply they work with developers. CrazyGames wins on pure sheer variety and the total number of games. Coolmath Games takes the cake for safety and education, and Newgrounds is number one for creativity and experimental games. Specifically for indie devs, the promise of curation, the quality of developer relationship, and a revenue-share from the biggest platform around (with 100 million users!) is what's best.

The User Experience: What Players and Developers Actually Say

One concept underlies the player experience on Poki: no friction between player and game. No downloads, no need to create an account, and no lengthy loading screen that tests player patience. Games are instant browser launches within seconds across desktop, tablet, and mobile. Poki's cross-device support uses web technologies- enabling games to run across devices and operating systems without requiring the installation of a native app. Poki games are developed with and optimized for HTML5, a web technology that allows games to run efficiently in any modern browser on desktops, mobile, and tablets alike. In 2017, Poki received a Red Dot Design Award, both for its user experience and effective service design as an online playground for free games. Many player comments note the clean interface and the quick load and lack of invasive advertising, both of which often plague other platforms. Poki's ads are rewarded video ads rather than the intrusive style that forces players to watch to get in.

The model maintains player engagement and allows advertisers to present themselves to an audience that has made the explicit decision to watch, which is very different than forced views, the original problem with web advertising. Developer experience is where Poki's model becomes extremely clear and powerful. Developers speak of a level of direct, personal attention from the Poki team that is atypical for any platform of this size. Feedback on how the games performed. Suggestions for optimisation. A joint process before a game was released. For a lone developer or small indie team, support from a platform of 100M MAUs takes the developer from struggling individual to true platform advocate. This is the same idea as in our article about how to turn customers into brand advocates. If you treat developers like partners, not content producers, then those developers will be your greatest advocates.

The Bootstrapped Model That the Venture World Missed

Here is the controversial business narrative of how Poki managed to dominate. Poki has never accepted any outside investment. The team of an independent Dutch company, growing from 50 to 65 people in just 12 months, built the browser game community that now supports 100 million players per month. 65 people. 100 million people. No funding from outside. While venture capital has been focused on the mobile gaming industry for a decade now, funding console game publishers and gaming infrastructure businesses, nobody has invested in the revival of browser games. Yet, it built itself from advertising revenue, one game and one developer partnership after another.

This mentality ensured that larger competitors with more cash reserves did not focus on this segment long enough for the company to cement its dominant position in the market. This is the ideal bootstrapped founder story; build in a segment that has already been abandoned and wait patiently while other firms have other, grander projects on their plates, and reach scale. As explained above in the section on startup fundraising and bootstrapping strategy, revenue-funded companies tend to have an advantage over others that have secured large investment capital, as decision-making is always based on practical considerations rather than pleasing investors, while the game industry is only now observing Poki, knowing they should have noticed it years ago.

The Organic Search Advantage That Nobody Can Buy

A major structural strength of Poki is its search presence. Each month, millions of users turn up on Poki without even looking for Poki. A player Googles "free online games" or a specific game title, and it's very common for Poki to be on the top result page. It's not an ad-it's the result of 10 years of consistent, good content publishing that Google now knows it can rely on. Organic search is effectively a customer acquisition channel with positive compounding. Each time Poki publishes a new game, it's a new piece of content that ranks on Google and sends new people to Poki.

What the Gaming Industry Is Starting to Understand

For much of the past decade, the browser resided at the absolute bottom of the stack in serious game developer priority lists. Investment, talent, and marketing dollars poured into consoles and mobile, and the browser picked up a passive audience that everyone seemed to ignore. That dynamic has shifted significantly. Bloomberg declaring web gaming the next big thing in 2025 was less a prediction and more a statement of fact based on what Poki has been showing for years. The zero-friction experience of browser gaming-no download, no payment, no login-increasingly matches how consumers want to consume entertainment. Casual. Quick hits. Accessible on any device. Mobile gaming has owned this space for the past decade based on the smartphone explosion. Web gaming is owning it once more based on the more mundane premise that it was always a good platform to begin with, and no one was serving it. As we have touched upon in our other coverage of how AI will reshape remote teams and digital platforms, the players that form real consumer habits on emerging channels before they're crowded end up with structural advantages that are difficult to overthrow. Poki has this on the web.

The Developer Community: 600 Studios and Growing

The Co-founder of Poki, Michiel van Amerongen, is stating for 2026, "we are eager to further strengthen our leadership position within the ecosystem by having a qualitative approach to everything we do. With more people than ever playing games on Poki, it has never been as critical as now to maintain our 'quality over quantity' principle. We will continue to handpick the highest quality content and will work closely with the most valuable studios. Quality over quantity becomes a useful constraint that makes a developer community valuable. Any developer working with Poki knows their title will not be launched in all circumstances. This selective feature gives Poki the ability to provide meaningful launches.

When a title gets through the selection process and the game is live on Poki, it is placed in an ecosystem of 100M MAU's. It has a real chance to become discovered by millions without any cost through organic discovery, which is impossible for an indie on the app store without a marketing budget. Impossible on Newgrounds because it does not have the same scale. Impossible on CrazyGames because it doesn't have the same quality filter as Poki. The latter can offer this. That's why developers keep choosing Poki. Developer stories are linked to what we discussed in the story about Runna as a startup; if a platform deeply cares about the success of the people in its ecosystem, it can form communities that are exceptionally difficult to compete with.

Where Poki Stands in 2026

Poki is now the world's largest web gaming platform. 100M MAUs. 625M people reached in 2025. 1 billion games played in one month. Over 600 development partners. 1,500+ handpicked games. 65 employees. Raised $0 external capital. Winner Best in Business at the Dutch Game Awards 2025. Red Dot Design Award for the user interface. Michiel van Amerongen and Sebastiaan Moeys are still the co-founders and CEOs of a business they grew from a contrarian bet on a category the industry deemed to be over. That category turned out to be massive. That bet turned out to be right. And the 65-person company in Amsterdam carved out dominance before anyone with any money had time actually to compete. As discussed in our story on what separates founders who make it from those who don't, founders who have a real conviction for an undervalued category, are patient enough to wait for the market to catch up, and execute perfectly to build positions that few will ever get them back. Poki is one of those positions.

FAQ: Poki Startup Story

Q: Who owns Poki?

It's co-founded and privately owned by Michiel van Amerongen and Sebastiaan Moeys. The company has never sought outside investment, having been self-funded since its launch in Amsterdam in 2013.

Q: How does Poki earn money?

Poki monetises primarily through advertising. The main source of revenue is rewarded video ads, where the player is offered a reward (e.g., an in-game benefit) to watch the ad. This advertising revenue is then split with developers on a pro-rata basis based on how successful their games are on the platform.

Q: How many players does Poki have?

Poki has 100 million active monthly users and 625 million total players on its desktop and mobile versions in 2025. In June 2025 alone, the platform processed one billion gameplays.

Q: Is Poki better than CrazyGames for indies?

If you are a solo indie dev whose only desire is for your game to be seen purely on merit rather than what budget you have for marketing, then Poki, with its highly curated approach and hands-on approach with developers, is a superior platform to CrazyGames. Whilst CrazyGames' barrier to entry and sheer volume are very accessible, Poki is more likely to provide you with greater recognition and reduce your bounce rate.

Q: How do I get a game onto Poki?

The simplest way is to submit a proposal through the Poki developer portal. The Poki team then evaluates and tests all incoming game submissions before working with the successful ones in terms of optimisation and presentation before their release. They only release one game a day, making their submission pool quite exclusive. Your game needs to be HTML5, be up to Poki's quality and performance standards, and then once they accept it, you work with the platform to launch it properly.

Q: Does Poki pay developers?

Yes. Poki shares the advertising revenue it generates with developers proportionally to how successful their game is. Some studios that have been with Poki for several years have reported a tenfold increase in revenues and even earnings of a million dollars a year from the platform (data provided by the Dutch Games Association).

Q: What's different about Poki compared to App Store or Google Play?

Whereas the visibility for games in the App Store and Google Play is largely determined by the amount of budget developers have for marketing, on Poki, a solo indie developer and a major studio have an equal footing and play time, not acquisition spend, are the most important factors for getting a game noticed on the platform. It requires no upfront fee, no publishing advance, and no shares in the development studio.