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Sure, but.. it does require downloading steam, which is a huge barrier to entry. As someone who's not a gamer, I've never downloaded Steam, which bars me from b

Sure, but.. it does require downloading steam, which is a huge barrier to entry. As someone who's not a gamer, I've never downloaded Steam, which bars me from being exposed to all of it's content. That barrier also probably prohibits non-gamers such as myself from becoming ultra casual gamers. I'm sure the content is incredible, and I'd probably find it addicting. But heck, I can't be bothered into downloading steam. I'd be interested to see how landing on a webpage with a game ready-to-go turns non-gamers such as myself into infrequent or even frequent gamers. I would also argue that the ubiquity of the web is what makes games like agar.io and slither.io so popular, especially for kids. I remember being at techshop in SF and seeing kids rushing straight to their computers after school and opening slither.io and playing instantly. No friction. I'm sure that lends to their success. The web is great!

pfisch 8y ago
You land on the webpage. Now enter all your payment info, validate purchase, make account. Cool Or is it f2p? So you land on page, still need to make an account for persistence. Also will need to do credit card eventually for game developer to make money. Also now game developer is looking at cdn costs of over 500 a month at a minimum for any kind of real game that is even 0.5 gb in size. I actually own a web assembly f2p game like this. It is really not a bright future for games that compete with real client games on steam that are not tiny and have the barest performance requirements. With unity basically the entire game needs to fit in like ~512 mb of ram, and runs poorly.
- giornogiovanna 8y ago
  Or, you can create an account after investing a few hours or so into the game, at which point a bit of friction is irrelevant. And sure, the credit card details will have to be entered eventually, but again, you'll be very invested at that point, so a bit of friction doesn't matter. Regarding the CDN costs, with some very aggressive caching (Service Workers and stuff), is it really that much worse than a downloaded game? You're the one who actually has a game, though, so I guess there really is a problem here.
  - pfisch 8y ago
    You don’t pay for the bandwidth to download a game on steam.
    - giornogiovanna 8y ago
      That's a good point, although I'd guess that Steam's 30% cut should more than cover it.
      - pfisch 8y ago
        Depends how successful your game is, the price per copy, and how big it is.
kkarakk 8y ago
you're advocating for captive audience pre-installed appstores not the web

pfisch 8y ago

You land on the webpage. Now enter all your payment info, validate purchase, make account. Cool Or is it f2p? So you land on page, still need to make an account for persistence. Also will need to do credit card eventually for game developer to make money. Also now game developer is looking at cdn costs of over 500 a month at a minimum for any kind of real game that is even 0.5 gb in size. I actually own a web assembly f2p game like this. It is really not a bright future for games that compete with real client games on steam that are not tiny and have the barest performance requirements. With unity basically the entire game needs to fit in like ~512 mb of ram, and runs poorly.

giornogiovanna 8y ago
Or, you can create an account after investing a few hours or so into the game, at which point a bit of friction is irrelevant. And sure, the credit card details will have to be entered eventually, but again, you'll be very invested at that point, so a bit of friction doesn't matter. Regarding the CDN costs, with some very aggressive caching (Service Workers and stuff), is it really that much worse than a downloaded game? You're the one who actually has a game, though, so I guess there really is a problem here.
- pfisch 8y ago
  You don’t pay for the bandwidth to download a game on steam.
  - giornogiovanna 8y ago
    That's a good point, although I'd guess that Steam's 30% cut should more than cover it.
    - pfisch 8y ago
      Depends how successful your game is, the price per copy, and how big it is.

kkarakk 8y ago

you're advocating for captive audience pre-installed appstores not the web