About watermellon

watermellon is a browser arcade. Every game runs in the page — nothing to install, no account, no sign-up. It exists because the games worth playing on a school or library laptop are usually the ones that machine is least able to run, and a plain web page is the one thing that always works.

Who runs it

One person, as a side project. There is no company behind it and no team. The quickest way to reach whoever is responsible is the contact page — it is the same inbox for everything: bugs, questions, takedowns, advertising.

Where the games come from

One of them was written by us — Stellar Drift, a procedural 3D space exploration game built for this arcade. Everything else belongs to somebody else, and the site never pretends otherwise: every game is credited by name, author and source on the credits page and again on its own page. They arrive by five routes:

• Streamed from a distributor. The great majority come from Famobi and Miniplay, who license these games and run embed programmes for exactly this. The files sit on their servers, not ours.
• Framed from the publisher's own site. A handful of the big multiplayer titles load straight from the people who run them, so you are playing on their servers.
• Self-hosted. A small number are kept here as files, either because they are open source under a licence that permits it, or because the developer gave written permission.
• Preserved Flash games. Sixteen classics from the Flash era are held here as files and played by Ruffle, an open-source Flash player we also host. Flash was switched off in 2020 and the sites that ran these games are gone; the copies come from the Internet Archive's preservation collection. Each names its original developer and links back to the archive item it came from, and any of them comes down on request.
• Written here. Stellar Drift is ours — no engine licence, no distributor, no third party in the loop.

Some games are routed through this site rather than loaded direct. That is not to hide where they come from — the source is named on every game's page — it is so a game keeps working on a network that blocks the distributor but not us.

How it is paid for

Advertising, through Google AdSense. Ads are kept out of the game frame itself: nothing is placed over a game, under a control, or anywhere it could be clicked by accident. The games streamed from distributors carry the distributor's own ads, which are theirs rather than ours.

There is nothing to buy on this site, no subscription, and no paid tier.

What we collect

No accounts, so nothing to sign up with and nothing to lose. Favourites and settings are kept in your own browser's localStorage and never leave the device. The site itself asks for no personal information at all.

Two things do reach third parties, and it would be dishonest not to say so: Google AdSense sets cookies and uses them to choose ads, and a game streamed from a distributor is subject to that distributor's own privacy policy while you play it. The weather chip on the home page calls open-meteo for a forecast and removes itself if that call is blocked.

If something here is yours

Then say so and it comes down — no notice, no lawyers, no argument. The DMCA page has the address and the process, and the answer is the same whether you send a formal notice or a one-line email.