Maksim Kochergin

Maksim Kochergin runs editorial at nub.games. Day-to-day that means deciding which of the ~15,000 HTML5 games in our catalogue actually belong on the homepage, fixing the relevance grade when the AI scorer puts an obby into the wrong genre bucket, and writing the blog guides that walk newcomers through the niches we cover best — obby courses, parkour challenges, tycoon simulators, nubik adventures, and the broader Roblox-and-Minecraft-adjacent universe of free browser games.

The editorial line is straightforward and predictable. Game pages are kept clean — no display ads, no autoplay, no overlay popups while a child is mid-jump on an obstacle course. Every game runs in a sandboxed iframe; we don't ask players to register or hand over personal information to play. Games with in-app purchases or higher age ratings are labelled, not hidden, so parents and kids can decide for themselves. Where the catalogue importer's AI relevance scorer disagrees with our taste — a kid-friendly platformer mis-tagged D-grade because of an unusual thumbnail, a tycoon mislabelled as casual — we override it manually. Algorithmic-only curation has a long tail of false positives, and trying to be exhaustive about a 15,000-game catalogue without human judgment is exactly how a kids' site ends up surfacing content it shouldn't.

The editorial layer of nub.games came together when the catalogue grew past a few hundred titles and pure algorithmic ranking stopped being good enough. The blog skews toward genre primers (what an obby actually is, why tycoon games hook kids, how parkour titles differ from action platformers) and curated lists (best obby games right now, top 2-player browser titles, what's actually new this month). The lists are based on time spent in the games, not on a play-count column — we have one of those, but it's mostly noise from the catalogue import.

If you spot a factual error, a game that should not be live on the site, or a missing label on a game with in-app purchases, write to maxdev@appyapp.org. I respond within five business days and fix factual errors within thirty. Corrections are made in place — we don't quietly delete posts and pretend the original version never existed.