Free Arcade is a small, independently run site with one purpose: to put games you can actually play, right now, one click away. No launcher, no store page, no account, no forty-gigabyte download that finishes some time next Tuesday. You open a tab and you are playing.
This started as one person wanting to make the kind of game he grew up with, and never finding a good reason to stop. The first one, Shadowmon Hunters, began as a single question — what if catching a monster meant getting through its armour first? — and grew into two hundred creatures, fifteen types, nine zones and an eight-chapter story. The second, Iron Circuit, is still being built in the open, rough edges and all.
Everything on the shelf is made here rather than licensed in from somewhere else. That is slower, and it is why there are two games rather than two hundred, but it also means nothing here is a repackaged advert with a play button stuck on the front of it.
Each game is a single HTML file. That is not a technical curiosity, it is the whole design. One file means it loads fast on a phone, runs the same on a laptop, a tablet or a television, can be added to a home screen and played with no internet at all, and can be handed to somebody as a file they keep. There is no server sitting in the middle deciding whether you are allowed to play.
Saves work the same way. Your progress is a code shown to you and held on your own device. Nothing is uploaded. That means nobody can take your save away from you, and it also means nobody can get it back for you if you lose it — a trade this site makes deliberately.
Nothing to sign up for, nothing to verify, no password to forget.
Download it, keep it, play it offline. It is yours.
No energy meters, no timers, no currency, nothing to buy.
The games are free and there is nothing to buy inside them, so the site is paid for by advertising. Adverts are served through Google AdSense and they sit on the pages that describe the games — never on a page while a game is being played. There are none that interrupt you, none that have to be watched before you can continue, and none dressed up to look like a button.
If that ever stops being true it is a bug, and telling us about it is genuinely useful. What the adverts collect, and how to turn the personalised kind off, is set out on the privacy page.
Iron Circuit is the current work in progress and will keep changing week to week. Past it, the shelf is meant to keep growing — more small games, made properly, rather than a flood of filler. There is no roadmap page because there is no roadmap. Things get added when they are good enough to play.