Hypackel: A Game Hub's Evolution and What's Next

TL;DR

This project started in 2023 to provide a central, updated source for online games. It gained popularity quickly but became costly as the site grew. After a switch to Google Firebase, the site remains active but won't receive updates. You can still access the site at hypackel.com, but other mirrors will be taken down. Moving forward, free services will be used, and game requests are no longer accepted.

For those who still would like an updated, unblocked, ad-free URL, you can donate right here. You can still request games on the paid URLs and there may be other fun things on those.

After donating, please contact me on discord @hypackel for faster replies or email support@hypackel.com

Full Story

The project kicked off in November 2023, addressing the need for a centralized and regularly updated source for online games. Users could even request new games to be added. Thanks to features like the tab cloak, which disguised the site as an educational tool, and the cloudfront.net URL, it wasn't blocked as easily as other game sites. Within months, the site had spread widely, but the increased popularity led to rising costs, especially as games grew more complex. Efforts were made to compress files, but this could only go so far.

By early 2024, the influx of visitors caused costs to climb further, despite continued compression. Approval for Google AdSense was secured, but the revenue only covered about half of the monthly expenses.

In summer 2024, the site was rebuilt using Next.JS, adding new features like a login system and the ability to save progress. The rebuilt site was rolled out at the start of the 2024-25 school year. Along with this, the hosting provider was changed from AWS to Google Cloud Platform as part of learning about different services. However, there was a major issue—Google AdSense couldn't be applied to subdomains like a.b.example.com, which Google Cloud assigns. Whereas, CloudFront assigns d(some numbers).cloudfront.net This meant losing out on potential ad revenue.

Recently, the decision was made to switch to Google Firebase, a free alternative. This change may have caused some disruptions, as Firebase URLs are sometimes blocked, and the instructions for switching to another URL were unclear.

After reflecting on what the project had accomplished, the decision was made to keep it running, but without future updates. The focus will shift to free services, and hypackel.com will be the sole active site.

The run.app URLs might stay active for a while longer, but the decision has been made to surrender in the ongoing struggle against school and workplace blocks. There's always a chance that this project will restart in the future, with other mirrors being relaunched. A large backup of the code (7 GB), saved from a few months ago, is still hosted on GitHub, and it might be made public soon. Thank you to everyone who supported this project, and perhaps we'll meet again in the future.

FAQ