Sending My Games Out Into the World

I distributed Soosooland's games to platforms abroad

1. More Visitors, But a Growing Unease

Last month, Soosooland averaged about 50 visitors a day. Since July, that number has climbed past 100 on many days.

But the real reason behind the jump in new users was Google Search Console: my average ranking position rose sharply. Over the past seven days, my average position hit 3.2.

Even so, watching so many people show up and play such a wide variety of games didn't make me happy — it made me anxious. Copyright infringement started weighing on my mind.

That anxiety traces back to something I read a few days ago. I recently read about a developer overseas who built a viral fruit-merging game with AI in just a few days and made significant money from it — closely modeled on a well-known original. Following the link he’d posted, I found the site itself, and it was strikingly similar to the game it was based on.
Is it really okay to copy something that closely? I wondered. And was it okay to brag about it on a site like Medium? 

2. Deciding to Go Preemptive

Soosooland gets a lot of visitors these days, but there are no ads, no downloads, no monetization of any kind. I've registered my games with the Korea Copyright Commission, but if someone copied my games and distributed clones elsewhere, it would take a toll on my peace of mind. So I decided to get ahead of it — to distribute my own games to overseas browser game sites myself, first.

The truth is, there are countless similar games out there. But Soosooland's games aren't the kind that take years of coding, where design, story, visuals, and characters make up most of the development effort. For me, the idea is 90% of the work — AI handles the coding in no time. Which means if someone takes my idea, they've essentially taken the whole game.

Going forward, I plan to spread my games far and wide, and the first one I chose to release was NumNum.

To prepare it for distribution, I stripped out absolute file paths, switched Firebase over to local storage, and removed Google Analytics. Then I started uploading to several sites at once — and quickly realized that had been a mistake. Every platform demands different specs and different image files, so I ended up wrestling with it for days.

3. Real Reviews of Overseas Distribution Platforms

**CrazyGames (Belgium)**
The requirements looked simple enough to upload easily, but review takes a long time. Current status: *Upcoming game / Status: draft, Flow: basic launch.* It's been a week since I uploaded, and it's still sitting there. In the developer dashboard, I can play the game through "Go to QA," but it hasn't appeared on the main CrazyGames site yet. There are 4 likes, presumably left by reviewers, and a rating of 8.0/10. I'm curious whether that score is good enough — good enough to actually get published.

**GamePix (Italy)**
GamePix requires the game screen to fit an 800×450 (width×height) resolution. NumNum is actually taller than it is wide, so I had to flatten it to fit. It passed review and is now live. Before playing, users have to watch an ad — and oddly, every single ad is targeted at Koreans. It's an Italian site, so how it manages to pull such precisely Korean-targeted ads is a mystery to me. Since forcing players to sit through an ad and hit "close" before they can play seems bad for user experience, I've decided to leave GamePix out of my promotion channels for now.

**itch.io (USA)**
There's no separate review process, so I can even upload work-in-progress files, and I get to set the screen size myself. It goes live the moment I upload it.
*(If you'd like to help NumNum become a popular game, please click this link to show your support.)*

The game runs well right now, and since there are no ads, I'll probably use this platform a lot for future uploads. Right now I've uploaded it without Firebase, so it only saves locally — meaning players can't compare scores with each other, which is a bit of a shame. If NumNum picks up more players on itch.io, I might consider reconnecting Firebase. If support here keeps growing faster than on other sites, I'd like to debut the rest of the Numstone series here first from now on.

**Poki (Netherlands)**
The homepage has a cute chick-yellow background. I've registered as a developer, submitted my bio, and am now waiting for login access. They say review takes two weeks, so I'm counting down those two weeks, hoping my credentials come through.

4. After Six Exhausting Days

Unfortunately, Korea doesn't yet have a real browser-game distribution platform of its own. I wish the Korean game industry would consider building an ecosystem for browser-based game distribution. I've thought about opening up Soosooland to other developers, too — but I can't guarantee anyone income, and managing it would be more than I can handle alone.

Normally, on Soosooland, Safari, Chrome, and Google's built-in scrolling let players get through a game even if the screen overflows. But on external platforms, I had to shrink text and spacing, simplify descriptions, and make menus collapsible — all to fit within whatever frame size each platform demanded.

Over those six days, there were so many small details to keep track of that I felt like I’d hit the limit of my brain’s capacity. My head felt foggy, and I couldn’t focus.
I was so out of it that I once poured cat food into the coffee machine instead of coffee beans. Luckily, my daughter saw me doing it. So I turned the machine upside down and shook it all out — problem solved. When I imagine what would have happened if I’d actually ground the cat food, it still makes me shudder.
For now, I stopped, rested, and put the whole situation into words — and only then did my mind finally clear up.

5. Why I Can Still Feel at Ease

And with that, I felt calmer too. Thankfully, I'd already registered Soosooland's games for copyright. And GitHub records — and proves — every step of my development process. I also learned that if someone ever copies Soosooland's games and uploads them to GitHub, Google Play, or any other platform, I can act quickly with a DMCA takedown notice, long before things would ever need to go to court.

I'll be distributing to Y8 Games soon as well. After experiencing several platforms firsthand — comparing profitability and how pleasant each is for players — I'll decide how to roll out the rest of my lineup.

From the very start, I built Soosooland with a global audience in mind, and made every game available in English too. And yet, most of the users Google sent my way were people searching in Korean. So Soosooland's games had to go out and find the wider world on other platforms. Of course, they're still fully playable on Soosooland itself.

6. Sensing a Hit

Added a day after posting.

Today I went to GamePix to swap out a file, and while clicking around, I ended up looking at the stats. Over two days, 10 people from abroad had played NumNum on GamePix, and their nationalities were all over the map — 2 from Germany, 2 from France, and one each from the UK, Italy, Latvia, Slovenia, Ukraine, and Vietnam. According to the dashboard, I’d earned 0.01 euros.

Since playing on GamePix requires watching an ad first, whatever guilt I’d felt about that vanished into thin air, and I suddenly thought: “NumNum is worth playing even with the ad.” I felt certain that anyone who tried it would find it genuinely fun, and that word of mouth would carry it to more and more players. That’s why I chose it to go first among Soosooland’s games.
I told my family, "I uploaded NumNum to GamePix, and 10 people played it and I made 10 won!"
My youngest replied, "That’s epic!" and the whole family celebrated.

🪄 Written by Soosoo, translated by Claude