Netcade Documentation

What is Netcade?

Netcade is an internet arcade: a place where games play instantly in your browser, and where the people who make games, videos, and music have real channels, real communities, and real earnings. There are two sides to it, and this page documents both:

• Players — play web games with one click (no install, no signup needed for free games), watch videos, listen to music, follow creators, earn achievements and XP.
• Creators — upload games/videos/music, build a subscriber base, and earn through sales, tips, supporter subscriptions, and hosting boosts. Fees are pass-through: Netcade takes no cut of your sales.

Create your account

1. Click the avatar icon in the top-right of any page and choose Register (or go directly to netcade.com/register).
2. Choose a username (this becomes your channel address: netcade.com/channel/your-name), enter your email, and set a password.
3. You're in — no email hoops before you can play. The same account is both your player account and, whenever you want it to be, your creator account.

Finding your way around

The header (top of every page) from left to right:

The front page's left sidebar adds shortcuts: Home, Unreal (files from our YouTube series), Shuffle (random game), Member, Creators, Documentation (this page), Discord, and the legal pages.

Your channel & profile

Every account has a public channel at netcade.com/channel/your-name. To set it up:

1. Open your channel (avatar menu → your name, or the Account link in the front-page sidebar).
2. Avatar: click the edit control on your avatar to open the avatar picker — free styles for everyone, extra packs for Members, plus limited drops. Once you own an avatar it's yours permanently.
3. Banner: click the banner's edit control to upload channel art.
4. Bio: as the channel owner you'll see an edit control on the bio line ("This creator hasn't written a bio yet") — write yours and save.

For players

Playing games

1. Open any game page and press PLAY (or click anywhere on the artwork).
2. Web games start right on the page — nothing to install. Use the fullscreen control for the full-window experience.
3. If the creator listed controls, you'll see a 🎮 Controls legend at the top of the description — the keys before you need them.
4. Desktop games show a Play on the Netcade client button instead: the free desktop client downloads, installs, and launches them Steam-style, and your achievements still count.

Watching & listening

• Videos: press T for theater mode. If the creator uploaded captions, toggle them with the CC button — your preference is remembered. Scrolling down the page keeps the video playing where it is, so you can read comments while listening.
• Music: tracks play in a persistent player bar, so the music keeps going while you browse the page. Albums list every track; click any row to jump.
• Under every video/game/music page you'll find the same action row: Add to Library · Playlist · Tip · Share · Report (+ Download where the creator allows it).

Library, wishlist & playlists

• Library = your personal collection. Click Add to Library on anything; paid items land there automatically after purchase. Open it from the book icon in the header.
• Wishlist = save-for-later. Click Wishlist on an item; find them all under the heart icon or netcade.com/wishlist.
• Playlists: click Playlist on any item → the "Add to playlist" window opens → pick an existing playlist or Create new, type a name, and add. Your playlists are reachable from your account menu.

Subscribing, friends & private messages

• Subscribe (free) on any channel or content page = follow that creator. Their uploads appear for you and your subscription counts on their channel. Un-click to unsubscribe. Subscribing costs nothing — Supporter subscriptions (below) are the paid tier.
• Add a friend: visit someone's channel and click Add Friend. They accept from their Friends hub, and you're connected.
• Friends hub (people icon in the header, or netcade.com/friends): friend requests up top, your recent message conversations next, then the rest of your friends with live status (online / in a game). Click any person to open the chat right there — Enter sends, Shift+Enter makes a new line.
• Messages are friends-only by design — no stranger spam. The ⋯ menu in a chat has View channel and Remove friend.

Tips & Supporter subscriptions

• Tip: press Tip on any content page, pick an amount, pay by card (Stripe). Your tip appears as a highlighted comment and the creator is notified. Almost all of it reaches the creator — only card-processing costs come out.
• Support (⭐ on channels and content pages of creators who enable it): a monthly subscription at a price the creator sets, with perks they define — early access, supporter-only content, and more. Manage or cancel anytime from your account. Creators receive 95%.
• Supporter-only items show a lock for everyone else; as a supporter they simply play.

Netcade Membership

Membership is Netcade's own optional subscription (monthly or yearly) — join from My Account → Membership. Members unlock the member avatar packs and member perks as they roll out. It supports the platform itself; it is separate from supporting an individual creator.

XP, levels, achievements & the leaderboard

• Achievements are defined per game by its creator. When you earn one you get the confetti moment, a bell notification, and its XP.
• XP also comes from engagement and creation milestones. Levels follow XP_needed(level) = 250 × level1.35.
• Levels map to tier badges — Bronze → Silver → Gold → Mithril → Adamant → Diamond → Grandmaster — shown on your channel and comments.
• See where you stand on the site leaderboard. Play time is engagement-verified: only real, active play counts — idling on a page does not.

For creators

Becoming a creator

1. Any account can create. Open the Creator Dashboard from your avatar menu (or netcade.com/creator-dashboard).
2. First visit walks you through the creator agreement — the short version: your work stays yours, non-exclusive, and selling is at cost (you pay only card-processing fees, no platform cut).
3. The dashboard sidebar is your home base: Overview, My Content, Analytics, Earnings, Monetization, Boost, Streaming.

Uploading — the wizard, step by step

Click + CREATE → Upload Content (header) or the Upload button on the dashboard. The wizard has three steps:

Step 1 — Upload File(s). Drag in your file(s) or click to browse. The type is detected from what you drop:

Step 2 — Required Info.

• Title and Description — the description supports full text; put your story here, not your controls.
• Tags (comma-separated) and genre — this is how browse/search finds you.
• Cover art — upload your own, or let the wizard auto-generate one, or check skip for now (you can add it later, but cover-less items stay off the front page and search until they have one).
• Games: Controls — one control per line as KEY — Action (e.g. WASD — Move). These render as the 🎮 Controls legend at the top of your game page, so players never hunt for the keys.
• Videos: Captions — attach a .vtt subtitle file and viewers get a CC toggle.

Step 3 — Additional Info. Price (leave free, or set a price — see Selling & fees), visibility (public/unlisted), and release status. Submit, enjoy the XP screen, done.

Review & statuses

• New uploads enter Pending review — a light human check that keeps malware and stolen work out.
• Watch the status chip on My Content: Approved means live; Declined shows with the reason. Your own game pages show you a status banner that visitors never see.
• While Netcade is small, review is fast — and you can always ping the Discord to have it looked at right away.

Managing your content

• My Content (dashboard) lists everything with status, views, and quick actions — edit metadata, replace the cover, or delete.
• Missing covers show a placeholder thumbnail and a warning chip — click through to fix.
• Deleting removes the public page; buyers keep access to what they bought.

Selling & fees (at cost — really)

Set a price in Step 3 (or edit later). Buyers pay by card (Stripe) or PayPal; the item lands in their library, and downloads (where you allow them) are delivered through secure, buyer-only links. Netcade adds no platform fee on sales. You pay exactly the card processor's cost — 2.9% + 30¢ — and keep the rest:

Wallet, earnings & payouts

• Everything you earn — sales, tips, supporter subscriptions, boost hosting — lands in your creator wallet (dashboard → Earnings).
• Fresh earnings sit in Pending (clearing) for about a week (fraud protection), then move to Available. The Recent activity list shows each credit and where it came from.
• Payouts: from Earnings, set up your payout method once (bank onboarding + tax info handled securely by Trolley, our disbursement partner — Netcade never stores your banking details). Then request a payout any time your available balance is at least $10.
• Your wallet also funds Boosts — earn here, promote from here.

Tips & Supporter subscriptions

• Tips need no setup: the Tip button is on all your content. You get a bell notification, the tip shows as a highlighted comment, and the money (minus card cost) enters your wallet's clearing hold.
• Supporter subscriptions are your paid fan tier (dashboard → Monetization → Supporters):
  1. Eligibility: unlock at 25 subscribers and 10 watch-hours — the progress bars show exactly where you stand.
  2. Define up to 4 tiers at $2.99 / $4.99 / $9.99 price points, each with the benefits you choose (early access, supporter-only content, and more as benefits roll out).
  3. Mark any upload supporters-only and it locks for everyone else.
  4. You receive 95% of every supporter payment, credited to your wallet each billing cycle.

Boost — promote your work (ads by creators, for creators)

Netcade's ad system has no external advertisers — every ad is another creator's work. That means two things for you: a way to promote your game, and a way to earn by hosting other creators' boosts.

• Free Boost: every creator gets one free promo slot. It fills ad space that paid boosts didn't claim, costs nothing, bills nothing, and reports the same real analytics. Manage it from the promo chip on your own content page.
• Paid Boost (dashboard → Boost → Create Boost): pick one of your uploads (or a banner), set a total budget from your wallet, and accept the suggested cost-per-view or tune targeting (placements, tags). You pay only for real views (5 seconds or more) — and 95% of your spend goes to the hosting creator, not to us.
• Hosting: boosts may appear on your content unless you turn ads off (you control this, including a per-advertiser blocklist, from the Boost tab). You earn 95% of what advertisers pay for views on your pages.
• Viewer protection: the platform shows a viewer at most one video pre-roll per 30 minutes, site-wide — boosts never wreck a first visit.

Live streaming

1. Open dashboard → Streaming. Your Server URL and Stream key are listed (click Reveal to show the key — treat it like a password).
2. In OBS: Settings → Stream → Service: Custom → paste the Server and Stream key.
3. Click Start Streaming in OBS — your live page is netcade.com/live/your-name, with chat, and you appear in the LIVE NOW rail.
4. The Go Live shortcut in the header's + CREATE menu takes you straight to this tab.

Analytics

• Dashboard → Analytics: views, watch time, and revenue per upload and over time.
• Watch/play time is trusted time — engagement-verified heartbeats while actually playing or watching, not time-the-tab-was-open. Small honest numbers beat big fake ones.
• Boost analytics (impressions, clicks, spend) live in the Boost tab and count only billed, verified views.

Desktop games & the Netcade client

• Upload desktop builds as platform zips in the same wizard; after approval your game page shows Play on the Netcade client.
• The client handles download, install, launch, updates — and gives your game achievements through a local API (see Desktop games below).
• Friends, presence ("in a game"), and your library sync between the site and the client.

Game API — achievements for your game

Any game on Netcade can award real platform achievements — confetti, bell notification, XP, leaderboard movement — without an SDK, API keys, or a backend. If you've used the Newgrounds or GameJolt APIs, this is the same idea with less ceremony.

Web games: one line

Your game runs in an iframe on its Netcade page. From anywhere in your code:

parent.postMessage({netcade: 'unlock', slug: 'first_win'}, '*');

That's the whole integration. The page verifies the message came from your game, that the achievement exists, and that the player is really playing — then fires the award. Repeat calls are safe: each achievement can be earned once per player.

Defining your achievements

Open your own game's page while signed in and use the Manage achievements editor in the achievements panel: for each achievement set the slug (what your code fires — a-z, 0-9, _, -), a name, a description, XP points, an optional icon, and an optional secret flag (shows as "???" until earned). They render on your game page automatically.

Programmatic alternative: POST /wp-json/netcade/v1/game-api/achievements with { content_id, slug, name, description, points, secret, icon_url } (owner-only; add "delete": 1 to remove). Anyone can list a game's achievements — secrets masked — via GET …/game-api/achievements?content_id=….

Optional JS SDK (promises)

<script src="https://netcade.com/netcade-sdk"></script>
<script>
  Netcade.unlock('first_win').then(r => {
    if (r.awarded) console.log('New achievement!');  // false = already earned
  });
</script>

Engine snippets

Unity (WebGL) — drop this in Assets/Plugins/WebGL/Netcade.jslib:

mergeInto(LibraryManager.library, {
  NetcadeUnlock: function (slugPtr) {
    window.parent.postMessage({netcade:'unlock', slug: UTF8ToString(slugPtr)}, '*');
  }
});
// C# side:
// [DllImport("__Internal")] private static extern void NetcadeUnlock(string slug);
// NetcadeUnlock("first_win");

Godot 4 (HTML5 export):

JavaScriptBridge.eval("parent.postMessage({netcade:'unlock', slug:'first_win'}, '*')")

Construct / GameMaker / anything else: use your engine's "execute JavaScript" action with the same one-liner.

Desktop games (via the Netcade client)

Downloaded games get the same achievements through a local pipe — while your game runs from the Netcade client, a tiny API listens on 127.0.0.1:23789. One HTTP call from any language (the client already knows the player and the game):

POST http://127.0.0.1:23789/unlock
Content-Type: application/json

{"slug": "first_win"}

// -> {"ok":true,"awarded":true}   (or awarded:false when already earned)
// GET http://127.0.0.1:23789/status  -> {"ok":true,"signed_in":true,"playing":614}

In Unreal use an FHttpModule POST; in Unity/Godot/GameMaker their built-in HTTP node — same call. If the client isn't running, the request fails to connect: treat achievements as optional and carry on.

Fair play

• Unlocks are accepted only from your game's own iframe on its own Netcade page.
• The player must be signed in with a real, recent play session for your game.
• Awards are idempotent — one grant per player per achievement, ever.
• Desktop unlocks require the game to be running from the signed-in Netcade client.

Content rules & safety

• Upload only work you made or have the rights to publish. Stolen games/videos/music are removed and repeat offenders lose their channel.
• No malware of any kind — every upload passes review before going public.
• No hate, harassment, or sexual content involving minors. Follow the law; keep it something you'd show at an arcade.
• See something wrong? Every content page has a Report button — reports go straight to review.

Getting help

The fastest route is the Netcade Discord — you'll talk to the actual developer. There's also the contact page. Creators: while Netcade is small, concierge help (we'll package and upload your game with you) is a standing offer — see netcade.com/creators.