HTML5 Games Beginner Guides >

DOs and DON’Ts of Gaming Portal Management

Sep 01 2025

Managing a gaming portal is not all about uploading games and waiting for players to arrive at your platform. Real success happens when you understand your audience, make intelligent decisions, and avoid pitfalls that can considerably drain your platform’s traffic or revenue.

 

Empower Your Gaming Portal with the Best Games in the Market!

 

In this article, I’ll outline the essential DOs to grow your portal’s audience and the DON’Ts that can quietly sabotage your platform’s success.

✅ Do Know Your Players

The most critical aspect of your portal management process is understanding your players and paying attention to their experience on your platform. Any improvement in your gaming portal without knowing your players is mostly guesswork and rarely effective.

Your chances of engaging your players and getting more in return increase with your level of understanding of them. Since this is the foundation of your platform, make sure that any decisions and developments in the ensuing steps are based on your understanding of your players.

 

The questions you should ask yourself about your players:

1. Who am I trying to reach? What drives them to play games on my platform? (Look for ways to outperform your competitors.)
2. How long do they spend in each session? (average time)
3. Which regions have the highest number of players/plays?
4. What types of games do they enjoy the most, and why?
5. Which games best match their preferences?
6. At what times of day are they most active on the portal?
7. Which browsers/devices do they most commonly use to access the portal?
8. Which parts of the games do they engage with most? (like multiplayer, achievements, or leaderboards)
9. How did they discover my portal? Direct traffic, social media, search engines, or recommendations?

 

✅ Do Regularly Add Fresh Content

It’s obvious, but essential: you should have a regular schedule to surprise your players with new games. This guarantees the viability of your gaming portal.

No portal can be successful by sticking to its old games only. Even a player’s most lovely games will become boring one day for him.
By adding fresh content, you also obtain insight into your players’ hidden tastes and interests that you haven’t observed so far.

 

Actions to take for adding fresh content:

1. Constantly monitor your players’ behavior.
2. Have a list of the games you need to add.
3. Find and contact the reliable game license providers.
4. Update your list ideas by:

• • Monitoring your players’ behavior, as well as their comments and feedback.
  • Reviewing your competitors’ portal library.
  • Adding completely new games to analyze your players’ reactions.
  • Similar games to the popular games among your players.
  • Brand-new and trending games that are receiving positive feedback.
  • Suitable evergreen games for your players.

 

❌ Don’t Rely on a Single Monetization Channel

As American multibillionaire Warren Buffett once said, “Never depend on a single income. Make investment to create a second source,” Relying on a single monetization channel on your platform is a strategic fault.

I’ve observed that gaming platforms’ sole reliance on subscription fees or ad revenue is a common weakness. In a crucial situation, like when the market changes, when rivals start using new strategies, or when player preferences shift, they will inevitably fail.

 

What to do:

If you own a gaming platform that relies on just one monetization model, you must change your approach and diversify your ways to make money. The new channel can be anything (Subscription, In-app purchase, etc.). Just think and don’t be afraid to test new models; you’ll find the best model that suits your portal and players.

 

❌ Don’t Use Too Many Ads

Remember a simple rule for in-game ads:

“More Ads ≠ More Income!”

It’s due to the player’s satisfaction level. As long as your players are enjoying the game, you can display your ads to them. One of the main reasons that players drop off is showing too many (and sometimes irrelevant) ads to them.

The chart below illustrates the relative relationship between your portal earnings and the number of ads you want to display to your players.

As you can see, there is a Maximum Earnings point at the top of the chart; this should be your portal ad channel goal: find a formula for displaying ads that maximizes your earnings.

 

Actions to take for establishing a highly efficient in-game ad strategy:

1. Ensure games display ads in the proper places and at the best time.
2. Ensure games display relevant ads to your players.
3. Monitor your ad performance and players’ behavior regularly.
4. Leverage the ad mediation tools to maximize your ad performance through AI.

 

✅ Do Leverage Trending Games

Always keep an eye on trending games in the market. To remain competitive with other gaming platforms, you need to provide trending games for players eager for new challenges.

There are always some new and old games that become popular for a while. As a gaming portal manager, it’s your must-do task to observe, review, prepare, publish, and ultimately analyze the performance of trending games among your players during their peak popularity.

 

Best places to discover trending games as soon as they appear:

To discover the trending games in the market, it’s important to have a list of the top websites and platforms where game developers share and review their creations.

A special thanks goes to Simon Sunden, CEO of Clutch Group, for providing a list of the best places to find trending games in a recent LinkedIn post about “How do you discover new games, gaming news and updated?”.

 

✅ Do Personalize Content Based on User Behavior

How powerful it would be if every player enjoyed a personalized experience based on their gameplay history.

Consider a user who enjoys playing calming games and figuring out puzzles on a regular basis. Both your most recent puzzle games and some of their old favorites, which are all in the game library, welcome them, making the experience feel comfortable, interesting, and familiar.

Creating such a system for your gaming platform necessitates a thorough understanding of player behavior, which can be improved over time by monitoring their actions. Even though it was difficult to develop, this system is well worth the effort and will significantly increase your income.

The post from Nikita Bokarev, CBDO at Playhop, explains how Playhop’s ML-based recommender system personalizes discovery by tracking player behavior and over 500 variables. Doing so provides a visualization of how such personalization feels to the end user.

 

✅ Do Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

Exploding Topics predicts that mobile devices will account for more than 64% of traffic by 2025. There are many players on your gaming portal, and if your website isn’t good, they’ll leave!

It doesn’t matter which demographic you’re targeting. If it’s children, teenagers, or even the elderly, having a responsive website is a must. It improves user interaction, encourages them to spend more time on your site, play more games, and ultimately, increases sales.

Remember that website responsiveness is a necessity. Don’t count on it as a unique feature to give you a competitive edge over the other competitors. It’s one of your platform’s core standards.

 

Mobile-friendly website tips:

1. Prioritize the responsiveness of your website from the beginning. It can cost you a lot if you want to change it mid-way.
2. Regularly test your website on different devices, OSs, and browsers. There are numerous bugs under various conditions.
3. Always put yourself in the player’s shoes and act like him to find the hidden problems.

 

❌ Don’t Underestimate the Importance of Marketing

Imagine your gaming portal as a beautiful, charming toy store with a wide range of amazing toys and playthings. The only problem is that people don’t know you, so they visit an old toy store with toys that are far less charming and playful than yours.

It doesn’t matter how excellent your gaming portal is, as long as people aren’t aware of you, no player will come and play.

Marketing tools (including SEO, social media, ads, content, campaigns, etc.) can significantly raise your website traffic and make loyal players for you. The higher the quality of your marketing strategy, the better the players with a higher engagement rate.

 

Actions to take for establishing a highly efficient marketing strategy:

1. Equip yourself with good marketing courses or hire a good marketing manager.
2. Dedicate a part of your budget to marketing.
3. Select the most effective games for your players (Every game is content from the marketing POV).
4. Use appropriate, strong copywriting on your games’ pages.
5. Be active on social media platforms where your players are.
6. Run occasional events to attract new users and also engage existing ones.

 

❌ Don’t Publish Low-Quality Games

Over the years, I’ve encountered numerous gaming portals filled with low-quality, substandard games that initially appear unappealing. Unfortunately, it also applies to the games’ mechanics; uneven, inconspicuous, and boring!

Saving money isn’t a good excuse for not buying games that your players deserve. If you can’t afford to buy 10 appropriate games, decrease the quantity, not the quality. One metric more important than the cost of the games’ license is Return on Investment (ROI).

 

ROI = [(Income – Cost) / Cost] * 100)

 

For example, if you spend $1K for obtaining a game’s license and after 6 months you earn $4K from it, your 6-month ROI would be:

 

6-month ROI = [($4000 – $1000) / $1000] * 100 = 300%

 

It means you earned 300% of your cost from a game after 6 months. Good Job!

This metric shows you how much revenue you generated from your spending and whether it was worth it. Always try to buy games with higher ROI.
Read the 7 Tips for Buying Profitable HTML5 Games License article to fully understand the characteristics of a quality game and how to find them.

 

✅ Do Leverage Evergreen Games

Evergreen games are those with straightforward, replayable gameplay. That means they’re unaffected by fads over the years. It doesn’t matter if it is 2000 or 2030; evergreen games are the ones that players return to.

If you’re looking to ensure consistent traffic for your gaming portal, offering quality evergreen games is a safe bet to retain non-gamer users with low expectations who prefer classic games (sometimes they have a major share of your total players).

 

Some of the most well-known games in this category are:

• Tetris
• Sudoku
• Mahjong
• Chess
• Solitaire

 

Conclusion

As I said at the beginning of the article, managing a gaming portal is much more than uploading the games, and it requires strategic thinking as well as the ability to react rapidly to constantly shifting market dynamics. The changes in the game industry happen faster than light and competitively. That’s why it always challenges us to be one step ahead of trends and player expectations. Remember that the only rule that can be the core of successful portal management is “know your players.” Without that, even the best strategies fail.

Some of the most crucial DOs and DON’Ts that any manager of a gaming portal should be aware of are highlighted in this article. From staying away from ad overload and poor monetization techniques to choosing the ideal combination of games and customizing content. Building a portal that draws players in and maintains their interest over time requires careful consideration of these factors.

In the end, your gaming platform is like a live product that needs to be nurtured, observed, and improved. You can use your players’ behaviours as the compass of your next actions, invest your time and money in quality content, and not be afraid to test new strategies or ideas. The thing is, the more value you offer to your players, the more sustainable and rewarding your platform will be in the future, both for you and your players.