Thanks for the answers!

I guess it makes sense that in-browser games would get better views. My main gripe is that in most cases, you have to choose between a stand alone build and a web build. Unity has both, but the webgl exports are often super slow and buggy. I might look into Godot, though, I've heard good things about it.

this isn't related to your question, but could you let me know when your shooter comes out? (FPS's are my favorite kind of game)

Another thing to keep is mind is what kind of metrics you want to keep track of

Downloadable distributions are easy to track: someone needs to click download.  Itch.io takes care of this, which is nice. But it can be a bit.. segmented by it's implementation.  Manually counting windows distribution downloads across several releases can be something you grow tired of super quick lol

Browser games? There's no download, just a page view.  And Itch.io doesn't automatically ignore scrapers and bots (like sharing on Twitter, Twitter will scrape the page for every-time the tweet "refreshes" while you're authoring it, and then once more for good measure before caching it.) So itch might report 200 views on your browser game.. COOL, till you hook up a real analytics platform to the page like Google Analytics and notice that only 1 actual person hit your page.

The raw APPEAL of a browser game is high: no barrier for entry, just load up and go.  Unfortunately, browser games have a negative reputation so people might be expecting a lesser experience and might be a _lot_ less tolerant of bugs, UX issues, and frame-rate dips. 

The downloaded distribution is great because they can launch it whenever, without first going to itch or other platforms.  But, I've noticed a frightening number of people just straight up not want to bother downloading something out of pure laziness.  Even friends of mine who "want to test it" or "support" you.  

Me: "Hey man what did you think so far?"
Them: "Ehh I had other things to do"
Me: "But you practically begged for it"
Them: "meh" 
^^^ Actual conversation with a friend. They cited the "work" involved in downloading and going through the whole process of extracting the archive or installing, and then finally launching the game.. 

In my personal experience, I've had so many visitors to my various pages over the years, but only the smallest fraction bother to download at all.  Where when a game is embedded in a page, it gets a lot more traffic by sheer virtue of just.. being there. 

The key to a good browser game experience is UX. They're already at your game, make it inviting to get them to click into the window to give it a real shot. Keep the load times low as possible, the ability to get into your game as quick as possible, and get the player into your addictive gameplay hook ASAP before their attention is grabbed by anything else going on on their screen.  When it comes to browser games, "hits" isn't your metric of choice to track, it'll be "Time on Page" in minutes you want :)

HTML5 games are now being used less and less. If you are developing html5 games, you should study the group characteristics of the game users. The popularity of smartphones and app games have made the market for html5 games less and less,,mainly because the gaming experience has been greatly improved and also meet the user's gaming habits.

mod edit: removed the embedded image