We make games that let you leave
Playmello started because we were all tired — of streaks, of energy bars, of games that treated our attention like something to be harvested.
In 2023 three of us were building live-ops systems for a mobile game studio. Our job, stated plainly in the brief, was to make people come back every single day — and we were good at it. Push notifications at the right hour. A streak that hurt to break. A timer that happened to end during someone's commute.
It worked. Retention went up. And then one of us watched their nan get genuinely upset about losing a 214-day streak while she was in hospital, and something about the whole arrangement stopped being funny.
So we left, and built the opposite.
Playmello games have no streaks, no timers, no leaderboards and no daily rewards. There is nothing to lose by not playing. Everything autosaves. When you close the tab, the game stops existing until you want it again — which, it turns out, is a surprisingly hard thing to sell to investors and a surprisingly easy thing to explain to players.
We're six people now, funded entirely by people buying our soundtracks and a small grant from Leeds City Council. That's not a lot. It's enough.
Our promises
Four things we will never build
These aren't marketing lines. They're in our studio charter, and we've turned down funding over two of them.
No streaks
Nothing you build in a Playmello game can be lost by not opening it. Come back after a year and your garden will have grown, not died.
No nagging notifications
We send exactly one email when a new game launches, and only if you asked. We have no push notifications at all, by design.
No loot boxes or energy
Nothing is gated behind waiting or paying. The games are free and complete; we make our money selling music to people who want it.
No behavioural tracking
Your saves live in your own browser. We don't run ad trackers, we don't build profiles, and we've never sold a byte of anything.
The studio
Who makes all this
Esme Fairhurst
Studio lead & design
Wrote the charter. Still plays Zen Garden most evenings and swears it's research.
Dami Adeyemi
Engineering
Makes everything run at 60fps on a six-year-old tablet, which is harder than it sounds.
Noor Lindqvist
Art & animation
Responsible for every rounded corner. Has strong opinions about the exact shade of moss.
Theo Whitlock
Sound & music
Records most of our soundtracks in a shed. You can hear birds in three of them.
Grace Bello
Accessibility
Tests every game with a screen reader and one hand before it's allowed out of the door.
Jonah Speight
Player support
Answers every email himself, usually within a day, always without a ticket number.
Come and play something slow
Everything we've made is free, in your browser, right now.