Stoop isn't a game. It's a network. Here's how six games promote each other.

The first time I thought about cross-promotion was after FlagGuessr launched. Someone might play FlagGuessr and not know DailyGuessr exists. Someone might play DailyGuessr every day and never find out there's a colour-matching game on the same platform.

The games weren't discovering each other. Players weren't either.

The fix seems obvious in retrospect: show links to other games. But where, how, and in what form matters more than it sounds.

Where players are most receptive

The worst place to show cross-promo is while someone is playing. They're focused. An "also try this" banner mid-puzzle is an interruption.

The best place is the results screen — the moment after a puzzle is complete. The player has finished. They feel something (satisfaction, frustration, pride). They have a moment. That moment is when "want to try something else?" lands naturally.

Every game in the Stoop network has a RotatingAlsoPlay component in the results overlay. It cycles through the other games every three seconds — name, emoji, short description, link. Not a banner. Not a modal. Just a quiet "also play" section that's there if you want it and ignorable if you don't.

The same component lives in the sidebar on desktop — visible all the time, not intrusive because it's in the sidebar rather than interrupting the game.

StoopNav: the shared header

Every game in the network has the same navigation bar: the Stoop logo, a list of daily games, a list of arcade games, the current game highlighted.

This does two things. First, it makes the network visible — a player on FlagGuessr can see Palette and Bloom in the nav without doing anything. Second, it signals that these games belong together, which builds trust: if you liked this one, the others are probably also good.

The nav was one of the last design decisions, and one of the most impactful. Before it, each game felt like an island. After it, they felt like a family.

One analytics dashboard

With six games tracked in a single Umami dashboard, patterns become visible that wouldn't be obvious from six separate graphs.

Which game has the best retention? Which one has the most same-day return visits? Which one sees the most cross-game navigation clicks? Does playing FlagGuessr in the morning correlate with playing Palette in the evening?

These questions can be answered — or will be, as traffic grows. The cross-game data only exists because the analytics are centralised. Six separate dashboards would make the connections invisible.

What "platform" means at small scale

Stoop isn't a platform in the Silicon Valley sense — there's no user data, no network effects, no flywheel. It's one person's collection of free browser games.

But it operates like a platform in one specific way: each game benefits from the existence of the others. A player who finds FlagGuessr through a Reddit post is a potential player for DailyGuessr, CocktailGuessr, Palette, Bloom, and Sortl. The cross-promo makes that connection possible. Without it, they're just one player on one game.

That's the actual value of building a network instead of isolated games. Not the revenue (there isn't any yet). Not the brand (it's small). But the compounding reach: each new game is simultaneously a new game and a new entry point to every other game.

BanknoteGuessr will launch into a network of six games. FactSlap after that. Each one arrives with five built-in partners.

That's the whole strategy, honestly. Small games that help each other. ✿