I mean tbf if any of the games here were viruses they would be obliterated within minutes so
Even still, it helps a lot with allowing people to play it on a variety of setups/OSes.
Speaking personally, I tried building my game for HTML and Linux and neither worked. Former I think because of certain programming decisions we made, latter because... I guess something's weird about my distro, I have no idea. I think this is a bit of a GameMaker issue and other engines have better build options & compatibility? But yeah that's why Snack Wanderer is windows download only.
If any of the games were real viruses we might not know until well after the jam was over and someone had a malware attack on their machine. Viruses are more sneaky than flashy these days. I think it’s more likely that someone’s antiviral software will signal a false-positive and everyone will dogpile on it because Lycos went bonkers over a PDB file in it. It happened twice already. Two games got flagged as viruses by people’s malware only to be cleared by virustotal.
I’m not sure if I’m coherent, but the point I’m trying to make is web builds avoid these problems entirely because the browser is sandboxed and you don’t have to download anything to try it. I like having both because I can play the game to see if I like it and then download it to keep it if I do.