itch.io

Linking to a defunct twitter account does not look professional, no matter why it is defunct.

Yes, you can use gmail for communication. But that is not what you proposed. You want to offer a service. You are not offering to collab with developers on a project.

It’s about providing a more structured and “platform-like” experience for users who prefer that.

Packing a web game into a distribution file is not a console, nor a platform experience. Browse some twine games on Itch that have download options to see examples how people distribute web games for download https://itch.io/games/platform-windows/tag-twine 

You want to make this somehow better? Ok. Nice thought. But your approach does not sound like a good approach. Packing the files in a zip for distribution will do the same and a developer would not need to use your service for that. Nor would players need to run an abstraction layer in the browser to actually run the game.

If you are old enough, maybe think back to flash games. What a nightmare it was. There was benefits, of course. The engine could do things, a browser could not - at that time. And you could run the files with a separate app. And some people even distributed the files to run outside of a browser even. But it was an abstraction layer with a huge lot of drawbacks.

Did you get the impression back then, that this was a console experience or a platform experience? There were are platforms for such games. But you would play the games on those platforms. As web games.

Using those .gw files is not a console experience, nor a platform experience.

Do you think there is a platform experience for .exe files? If your theory holds, there should be such a thing.

where visibility is pooled rather than fragmented — something that currently doesn’t really exist for HTML5 games in a structured way.

Sorry. But this is empty hot air marketing talk. And untrue on top about the non existence of such places. Ever heard of places like armorgames or kongregate? Or that curiuos little place called itch? You want to make the same, but better. Ok. But do not pretend you are inventing something new.

Also, such a place does not exist by converting files to a format. You need to make such a place. The platform. And that platform would not need the .gw format at all.

You want to have a runtime file that embeds a web game? Sounds cool. Only, we already have that. It is called .html and a folder structure to hold additional files. You can zip it for easy distribution and do not need a service to pack the file.

So your added value is obfuscation of the code, so ... that ... it is protected? Ok. I would guess people interested in that would just use something of this https://duckduckgo.com/?q=html+game+code+obfuscation+for+distribution&ia=web

but to reduce casual copying

You are aware that people could just copy the .gw files, do you? For player level protection, this .gw file approach does nothing, unless you implement a drm inside the abstraction layer of your additionally needed browser app.

So you want to put paranoid developers at ease, that think that someone might want to steal their amateur code base? Is that your nieche target audience?

If so, you might want to consider that developers are not players and players would decide which games to play. If you do not give incentive for players to chose games distributed with your method, the project will fail. And using an abstraction layer to be able to play the games, is not an incentive, but a barrier. It does not solve a problem on the player side.