Why Our Games Have No Ads, No Trackers, No Accounts

The usual pitch for a free browser game is: sign up, accept the cookie banner, dismiss the interstitial ad, play for two minutes, watch a forced video ad, repeat. We don’t do that. Driftmoth Games has no ads, no trackers, no analytics that identify you, no accounts, no email collection, and no third-party JavaScript running in the background. This page explains why, because the question comes up enough that it deserves its own answer.

Free should mean free

A game that costs you your attention to an advertiser isn’t really free. It’s barter — your time and focus in exchange for playing. That’s a fine deal for people who want to make it, but we didn’t want the game to stop every ninety seconds to sell someone something. So we don’t. None of our games have ads, in-app purchases, premium currencies, or upsells. You open the page, you play, that’s it.

Privacy is the default, not a setting

Most browser games load a constellation of trackers the moment you open them: ad networks, session recorders, fingerprinting scripts, A/B testing libraries. Each one is another party that gets to watch what you do. We don’t use any of that. Our analytics provider is Cloudflare’s cookieless Web Analytics, which counts page views in aggregate and doesn’t record or link anything to you personally. There’s no cookie banner on this site because there are no cookies to consent to.

If a game saves your high score, that happens in your own browser’s localStorage — the data stays on your device and never gets sent anywhere. Clear your browser data and it’s gone.

No account, no friction

Every second spent creating an account is a second not spent playing. Accounts are also a data-collection mechanism in disguise — the email address you hand over becomes a piece of identity that ties every session back to you. We skipped the whole thing. You arrive at a game page, you press Play, the game runs. Zero friction.

How we pay for it

This site is hobbyist-scale and cheap to run. It’s a static site built with Eleventy and hosted on Cloudflare’s free tier, with self-hosted fonts and assets. The games themselves are vanilla HTML5 Canvas and JavaScript — no game engine licences, no server-side anything. That means the marginal cost of one extra player is effectively zero, which is exactly why we can afford to keep everything free forever.

What we don’t do

The full story

If you want the specifics, we wrote them down — see the Privacy Policy, which lists every processor, every legal basis, and every right you have. It’s short because there’s not much to disclose. That’s the point.