>> Modern platforms want to own the entire stack top to bottom (editing tools, playback engine, discovery, and marketplace), but trying to capture so much value

>> Modern platforms want to own the entire stack top to bottom (editing tools, playback engine, discovery, and marketplace), but trying to capture so much value yourself and tightly controlling the environment can actually stunt the ecosystem. If anything, I see modern platforms using more off-the-shelf and standards based tech rather than reinventing the wheel. It used to be the case that you'd have to download not just Flash, but Shockwave, Silverlight, the Java applet plugin, Unity Web Player, and all sorts of proprietary plugins just to play games built on whatever proprietary game engine and scripting language came with it. It was like downloading individual video codecs in the early 90's before the advent of Quicktime. Nowadays, you can play fully fledged 3-D games on a Web Application built with any game engine, any language, on nearly any browser of your choosing. No plugins needed. I don't think web games are going to be siloed to particular platforms any time soon. What I do think is that web games are now competing with siloed AAA games. And this might be a good thing overall for competition in that space. For a long time Flash and mobile games were also-rans simply because of the limited computing power. Very few were of such caliber either in graphics or playability as to compete with contemporary installable or console games and were very often mimicries of those very same games. In the West, mobile games underwent a revolution with Angry Birds and Infinity Blade, there hasn't been a killer app that's reinvigorated the browser game craze of the Y2K era just yet. But Epic's interest in itch.io might be hinting at an attempt in that direction.