Our team uses https://backyard.co - it's free, has tons of really fun party games, and comes with built-in video chat. My favorites with large groups are Fake Artist, Word Scramble and Codewords
Make an io party game - the genre is super fun to create in, was growing rapidly before COVID, turbocharged during COVID and remains underserved. Growth is built-in because of inherent sharing. Use a game engine like Playcanvas so you can publish it to web and wrap it into a mobile app if you'd like (Unity is fine too, but doesn't work on mobile web, whereas Playcanvas works everywhere). Ads monetization is of course the quick route, but if you have the patience to add cosmetics and premium levels, you can make a killing from in-app purchases.
Like skribbl.io, an online Pictionary game. Maybe also things like agar.io or slither.io, but those are less for parties I think. Jackbox.tv comes to mind as well, but obviously that isn’t .io lol
Games ending .io are generally fun, simple, multiplayer, and browser-based
I used to work at a prominent venture capital firm where I started an initiative that required everyone on the investing team to respond to all inbound emails from founders, even if the reply was "Sorry, this isn't a fit for us." We tried for several months to respond with atleast 2-3 sentences about why we passed on companies if a founder ever asked. About 10% of founders said 'Thank you, that's useful' and moved on, another 10-15% straight up said "You're assholes" but moved on. The remaining majority were just incapable of understanding what we were trying to say since they were so sheerly blinded by their self-belief. Example, I remember emailing one founder of a poker game app back to say we didn't invest in gaming, only to receive an angry email saying poker isn't a game, it was a social activity. Thinking it would help, I replied saying 'Hey, thanks for the note. Really, our issue is that gaming apps and apps where the primary social activity is gaming, are very hits driven and we don't think we have the necessary experience ore desire to predict hits in this space.' He then proceeded to tell me why I did in fact have the skills required, even though literally no one on our team had consumer or gaming experience, and that I in fact also did have the desire to predict hits in this space - how could I not?_____"I was a VC after all"_____(direct quote)
A few months later, cold inbound emails that were passes went straight to archive...
