There are a lot of ways to release a video game. You can put it on Steam, where people are already looking for games. You can put it on the App Store, where people are already looking for games. You can put it on itch.io, which is smaller but still a place people go specifically to find games.
Or you can build a website, point a domain at it, and ask strangers on the internet to click a link to a place they've never heard of and play something made by someone they've never heard of. For free. With no reviews, no ratings, no store page, no trailer, and no reason to trust that it's worth their time.
That's the one I picked.
The platform problem
Steam has discovery built in. The App Store has charts. Even itch.io has browse pages and tags and a community that goes looking. A standalone website has none of that. There's no algorithm surfacing your game to people who might like it. There's no category page. There's no "you might also like." There's just a URL, and either someone has it or they don't.
This means every single player has to come from somewhere deliberate. A Reddit post. A tweet. A blog. A friend sending a link. You are the entire marketing department, and the marketing department has no budget and no idea what it's doing.
I posted to r/webgames, r/playmygame, r/horror, and a handful of others. Some posts got traction. None went viral. Reddit is good for a pulse of real human attention if you hit it right, and completely indifferent if you don't. There's no in-between where your thing slowly accumulates momentum. It either lands in the window or it doesn't.
The credibility problem
Even when someone sees the link, they have to decide whether to click it. And then they have to decide whether to actually play. That's two separate moments of trust from a stranger who has no reason to extend it.
My read on what Games by Will has going for it: no ads, no accounts, no paywalls. You click, it loads, you play. Nothing is trying to extract anything from you. That should count for something in an era where every free thing online is actually a funnel for something else.
What works against it: it's a website from someone you've never heard of. On Reddit, a few people assumed the games were vibe coded, which is the current shorthand for AI-generated slop dressed up to look like a real product. I didn't respond to those comments. The calculation was simple: anyone looking for a reason not to play has already decided, and engaging doesn't change that.
The honest version of the credibility problem is that there's no shortcut. The only thing that builds trust over time is the work itself. More games, more posts, more presence. Eventually the site either earns a reputation or it doesn't.
I don't have a solution to any of this. I have seven free browser games and a blog where I write about making them. That's the whole strategy.