Indie games with no install: why a small Korean studio put 50 of them on the web
"Indie games without a download button" — Oreum Games, from idle tycoons to adventure
· Oreum Games
Say "indie game" and most people picture something on Steam for a few dollars. But there is another way that is slowly growing: games you do not install at all. You click a link, the game starts a few seconds later, and if it is not for you, you close the tab and that is that.
Oreum Games, a very small indie studio in Korea, put that idea at the center of everything. In a little over a month it has released close to 50 games on its own website. Traditional board games like alkkagi and gomoku sit next to soccer, bowling, idle games and a horror game.
What an indie game is, and why the web
An indie game is one made by a person or a small team without a big publisher's money or a large development staff. The freedom is the good part. The hard part is getting anyone to notice the game once it is finished.
Steam gets a flood of new releases every day. On mobile, even after someone finds your game, there is still the download and the install standing between them and the first minute of play.
Oreum Games solved this differently. Instead of listing on someone else's platform, it made its own website the first platform.
There is no install and no sign-up. Each game is a web page, and the page is the game. Progress is saved in the browser, with no account, and the same address works on a PC and on a phone.
One a day, but days on a single physics problem
Most Oreum games have simple rules and short rounds. That comes from how people arrive at a web game. The studio's view is that the wall around a browser game has to be almost nothing, or people never start.
The flip side is that a low wall is easy to walk back out of. That is the weakness of web games.
So the goal became a game you open for a quick round and are still playing two hours later.
The games that actually did that were, unexpectedly, the traditional board games, alkkagi and gomoku. One player spent tens of minutes on the fart game.
Games are a matter of taste, and that is probably all this proves.
Oreum Games does not push one genre. It tries to build all of them.
Flick soccer, 3D bowling, idle games where you run a coin laundry or a fish-shaped pastry stand, a horror game built around the water ghost of Korean folklore, and BUY JEJU, an open world of Jeju island. The range is wide.
The developer describes the direction as "a game you can start with no install, but can hold onto for a long time if you want to."
A game site that is also an indie game lab
What makes Oreum Games interesting is that it is not only making a lot of games. It is also experimenting with how indie games get distributed.
Every game has its own intro page with a description and a list of common questions. Each one is made in English as well as Korean.
Abroad, the studio is putting games on itch.io and Indie DB one at a time. FINGER KICK was entered in a streamer feedback jam on itch.io and got reviews from developers overseas.
Along with praise for how finished the game felt, one note came up more than once: "well made, but hard." Oreum Games is using that outside feedback to set the difficulty of the games that come after.
What do 50 games prove
Not many indie studios ship dozens of games in a month. And the approach starts from a different place than Steam or the app stores.
Instead of building a game and then looking for a platform, the website itself is the platform, and the games keep stacking up inside it.
Where that leads in the long run is not clear yet. More games means more to maintain, and above all it means finding people who come looking for web games and keeping them.
One thing is already clear, though. An indie game does not have to have a download button.
Whether games that start the moment you open a browser can become a real way to distribute indie games is an open question. Oreum Games is running that experiment fast.