2 days until the gamejam begins. People are feeling hyped and want to know the theme! I hope it’s a fun one. 
I have prepared the next Pixcade site template though have not uploaded it yet. It’s responsive / simple / all that’s really needed. On Pixcade the games will follow the pattern of pixcade.com/game where the game is playable as an iframe (and has banner ads) and then pixcade.com/game/web will be a perfect fit fullscreen version that is what is iframe embedded (and has interstitial / rewarded video ads).
Usually I do not like including features like Google Analytics on my sites but for Pixcade we will use it since partners want to be able to see that data collected by a 3rd party and for Pixcade I want to help people get games going and get partners interested.
I reached out to a few rewarded video options for HTML5 games but only one replied so far. They are https://adinplay.com/ and so I’ll be testing their features first. They had me setup this file https://www.pixcade.com/ads.txt and am still waiting on ad unit code. It’s done through https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/9059370 I don’t know everything about how it works yet. If the user has Web Monetization enabled it will set a cookie/file in local storage and then if that is set on the domain every page will strip all ad displays like banner ads on the game pages. I want to test putting rewarded video ads everywhere in the games to the point of being annoying like a lot of the top F2P mobile games currently do. I want to balance that with a test game where there are only premium Real Money offerings and no in game ads at all. There are mobile games where you would think they would benefit from having rewarded videos in their games, but they don’t have them. I suspect it’s because they want to keep the users in their games, and it’s better to not push them out just for a few cents, better to keep them there and go for getting a few $$$.
Regarding ads, if anyone remembers Project Wonderful if other ad options don’t work out well I may make a self-service ad solution for Pixcade. That is anyone can sign up on the solution, then they can bid on ad space in any specific game they want to place ads on. Banner ads / rewarded video ads / and so on. If Pixcade takes off this will be worth investing in.
I’ll be using BunnyCDN again for this, used them before and no complaints. Reliable and inexpensive. I’ll be uploading versions of games to the Pixcade.com domain as well as itch pages for it.
If you participate in the jam make sure you domain / protocol lock your game. Domain Lock HTML5 games I’ll post again about this soon with an up to date version. For example, making it easy to include a list of partner domains who license your game for embedding on their site that don’t require editing the game itself to update.
Regarding PlayFab I’ve explored its features a bunch more. Tested the crucial questions I had initially. I’m confident in using it without any foreseeable problems… except that PayPal Transaction Ids are not lining up for me in my testss, waiting to hear back from them on that. I’ll share some more info about PlayFab in future posts such as related to Cloud Script patterns, gacha roll systems, and anything people have questions on hopefully I’ll be able to answer now.