The quiet H5 renaissance: why we picked the browser back up
On Christmas Day 2024, Leo and I were in a coffee shop arguing about what to make. The plan had been: build a mobile game, drop ~300K RMB into ASO and Singular-tracked Meta/TikTok campaigns, race for the featured list. Halfway through the conversation Leo said, "What if we don't make an app?"
That was the moment BverGame actually began. But it wasn't a flash of insight — it was forced by things that had been accumulating for three years.
The App Store is no longer a distribution channel. It's an ad slot.
In Q4 2024, the cost for a mainland-Chinese developer to push a utility app into the US iOS top 100 was roughly 4–7x what it had been in 2020 (figure is informal, drawn from peers in the space — varies wildly by category). That increase wasn't competition getting hotter. It was the store itself changing.
Apple aggressively expanded Search Ads through 2024. Type "calculator" into the App Store and the first three results are paid. Once paid impressions become the default experience, organic traffic becomes a luxury good. You either burn ad budget or you disappear.
Google Play is only marginally better. Google App Campaigns (GAC) routes 70%+ of installs through paid channels. Without a marketing budget, your app stays invisible.
For a two-person team, this math doesn't close.
Meanwhile, the browser quietly got good in 2024
On the other side, several things were quietly upgrading the browser's playability:
1. Mobile browser hardware acceleration is finally stable. Since iOS 17, Safari's Canvas 2D holds 60 FPS on iPhone 12 and up. Chrome on Android stabilized earlier. The "lag" excuse that killed H5 games five years ago is gone for lightweight titles.
2. PWA and Web App polish is close to native. You can "Add to Home Screen" almost any site, get an icon, get a splash screen, even offline support. Users can't feel the difference from an app.
3. Short-video culture demands "instant on." Users who tap a link from TikTok or YouTube Shorts won't wait for a 30 MB download, won't sign up, won't tolerate a notification permission request. The browser is the only honest answer to the 5-second behavior loop.
Crazy Games, Poki, Y8 — the old H5 portal sites — were quietly trending up on SimilarWeb through 2024 (verify with your own pull). Leo and I stared at those charts for a while.
But we don't want to be a game farm
After studying the big H5 portals, we also knew what we didn't want to become.
Their model: aggregate thousands of third-party games, monetize with ads. Not a bad model, but two problems we couldn't solve:
- Scaled licensing needs a BD team. We are two people.
- SEO farming requires a 1000-word "game description" article per game. Readers never read these — they exist for Google. Quality is uneven by definition.
We decided to invert the model: few, polished, hand-made, hand-written.
Concretely: all 24 games are Leo's code; all 24 articles are mine. That caps our total page count at 48, which is a structural SEO disadvantage. But every page is something real. No filler, no placeholders.
Where the actual return is happening
A few signals I'm tracking that would tell us H5's small renaissance is real in 2025:
Signal 1: the Game Pigeon effect spreading. Mini-games in iMessage going viral among friends is old news. What's new in 2024 is similar "embedded H5 games" appearing in Slack, Discord, Telegram. Games no longer need standalone apps — they're a link inside a chat.
Signal 2: itch.io's HTML5 category climbing. itch.io is the indie dev's natural home. Through 2024 the HTML5 submission count grew visibly (check the public itch.io submission feed). Plenty of devs skip Unity builds altogether and ship the web version.
Signal 3: ad partners reconsidering browser placement. Google AdSense quietly improved review turnaround for small indie sites in 2024 (anecdotally, from 2–4 weeks to roughly 1–2 weeks, with significant variance). That's a platform-level signal toward small operators.
What we built, and why
BverGame's specific choices:
- 24 games, not 100 — the limit of what we can actually maintain
- Native Canvas everywhere, no Phaser/Cocos — bundle small enough for first paint under 2s
- Full bilingual (zh-CN / en) — browser games have no regional moat, so go global from day one
- No signup, no server-side data — 100% static site, zero ops cost
The price of this combo is a low revenue ceiling. The reward: we can keep going indefinitely. No funding round, no team scale, no ad spend.
Closing: not a bet, a return
Flappy Bird in 2014 was essentially a packaged H5 game. Cirulli's 2048 was already a browser game. Earlier: Kongregate in 2008, Newgrounds in 2005 — all Flash, all browser. The pattern is clear: the browser has always been the indie game developer's natural home.
For ten years the App Store's promised land pulled us away. People are coming back.
BverGame is a small ripple in that current. But I'd bet 2025 brings more people to the same realization: you don't need the App Store. You need a URL.
Max is BverGame's co-operator with a decade in product roles at Chinese internet companies. Most figures here are informal, drawn from public industry reports and conversations with practitioners. Verify via SimilarWeb, Apptopia, Sensor Tower as needed. Personal views.