Curation over volume: a catalogue is judged by the second game a player opens

Volume is the easiest property for a games catalogue to acquire and the least useful. Listing a thousand titles is a matter of copying a list. Getting a player to open a second game is a matter of the first one having been worth the minute it took, and nothing about a longer list makes that more likely.

Why more is usually worse

Every additional title makes each existing title harder to find. A catalogue where the player cannot locate the thing they would have enjoyed produces the same result as not carrying it, while adding a title that competes for the same attention as one already there. The relationship between size and usefulness is not linear, and past a modest point it is negative.

In a browser, the exit is one tap away

This matters more here than in a store. There is no installation to justify, no purchase to protect and no account to log out of — a player who is not engaged in the first few seconds simply closes the tab. The cost of a bad first impression is the whole visit, which is why a browser catalogue should be judged on how quickly a stranger finds something they understand.

The filters, in order

Every title here has passed the same four questions, and the order is deliberate: a game that fails the first is not rescued by doing well on the others.

• Is it appropriate? No advertising inside it, no purchase that misleads, and no misrepresentation of who the title is for. A title aimed at older players is labelled as one rather than folded into a blanket reassurance.
• Is it understood in seconds? One idea, legible from the first screen, playable with a thumb. A game that needs a paragraph of instructions has not finished being designed.
• Does it run where people are? An older phone, a small screen, a slow connection and then no connection at all. A game that only works on current hardware is a game most of its audience cannot play.
• Is it different from what is already here? A second game of a genre already carried has to be better than the one that is there, not merely equal to it.

Saying no to good games

The hard part of curation is not rejecting bad games; those are easy. It is rejecting games that are perfectly good and would make the catalogue worse by being in it — a fifth puzzle game when four already cover the ground, a title that is excellent but needs a mouse, a game that is charming and takes ninety seconds to explain.

None of those decisions is a judgement of the work. They are decisions about a fixed amount of attention, and they are the reason a small catalogue can be more useful than a large one.

What this means if you are submitting

It means the strongest thing a submission can do is be immediately understandable on a phone. Not the most polished, not the most original in concept, but the one where a stranger opens it, plays for thirty seconds and knows what happened. Send a playable link rather than a trailer, because the only test that matters is the one a player performs: opening it and trying.