Browser Games With Gamepad Support
Games that were built for a controller, found by reading the builds rather than by asking.
48 games · hand-picked, then filled from the catalogue
Controller support is one of those things nobody advertises. A store page will tell you a game has cloud saves and forty-nine achievements, and say nothing about whether the pad already sitting on your desk will do anything. On browser games it is worse: there is no store page, and the feeds that list these games have no field for it at all.
How this list is put together
So it cannot be looked up. It has to be read.
Every game on this page declares a gamepad inside its own build. In a Unity game that is the input table, compiled into the data file, where a project that maps a controller has its joystick buttons written down and a project that does not has nothing. In a Construct game it is the Gamepad object, which a developer has to deliberately add to the project before a single line of it will run. Both are decisions the developer made months ago and never mentioned, and both are sitting in a file your browser downloads anyway.
That is a different kind of list from a tag. A tag says what somebody typed into a form; this says what the game is made of.
What it does not tell you is how good the mapping is. A build can declare a pad and use it for one button, and this list cannot see the difference between that and full analogue control. The hand-picked ones at the top are games we have played with a controller; behind them is everything else the builds admitted to, most popular first.
Worth knowing before you plug in: press a button on the pad once the page has loaded. Browsers deliberately hide a connected controller from a page until it sends something, to stop sites fingerprinting your hardware, so a pad that is merely plugged in stays invisible until you give it a nudge.
Questions people ask
Do I need to install anything?
No. Modern browsers expose a connected controller to a page through the Gamepad API, and a game that uses it will see your pad as soon as you press a button on it. Nothing is installed and nothing is configured.
My controller does nothing. What now?
Press a button on the pad first — browsers hide a controller from the page until it sends something, so a pad that is merely connected is invisible. If it still does nothing, click once inside the game so the page has focus, then try again.
Which controllers work?
Anything the browser recognises as a standard gamepad: Xbox pads, PlayStation pads, and most third-party controllers, over USB or Bluetooth. What the game does with the buttons is up to the game — some map the whole pad, some only use one button.
How do you know these support a gamepad?
We read it out of the build. A Unity game lists its input axes inside the compiled data, and a game that maps joystick buttons has them written there; a Construct game has to add the Gamepad object to its project, and that object is named in the project file. Neither is a claim anyone made about the game — it is the game's own build, read before you open it.