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I feel your excitement and wish it were true. I'm even building a game to leverage this newly supported tech. The good news is that the tech works really really

I feel your excitement and wish it were true. I'm even building a game to leverage this newly supported tech. The good news is that the tech works really really well and is very performant in the browser. You can do a lot of cool stuff! The bad news is that it's not the tech that is holding back web based game dev. It's the users. Market research and testing has shown that users dislike "just playing" a game in the browser. This is particularly true in the AAA segment that webassembly and its perf gains would best serve. Players who play the high profile games that web assembly would allow you to make games for (think Fortnite, CS:GO, etc) all want to play games from a trusted download from a trusted store, not some random website. Please note, random is used very loosely here to mean "any store/website that isn't Apple Store, Play Store, Xbox Live, PSN, or Steam". I foresee that we'll need some major player with a big game like Fortnite, Roblox or Mojang to spearhead using web deployed games before we'll see anything happen in this space. The existing "install to disk and play" is working just fine and game devs don't really see any reason to change that. The other major thing is that most "slightly" big games (even smaller mobile ones) have assets in the minimum size of 4-10 GB of data. Even if you can render the game in browser, you have to download those assets. Yes, of course you can "load only what you need" but for many many games (source: my wife is a game designer and I'm a game programmer/web dev) that still entails at least 1 GB of data that would need to be loaded and is difficult to cache client side in the browser.

kitsunesoba 5y ago
> Market research and testing has shown that users dislike "just playing" a game in the browser. This is particularly true in the AAA segment that webassembly and its perf gains would best serve. > Players who play the high profile games that web assembly would allow you to make games for (think Fortnite, CS:GO, etc) all want to play games from a trusted download from a trusted store, not some random website. No doubt this is partially thanks to the numerous game-like ads that link to exceptionally cheaply made web games. I remember a time in the late 00s and early 10s when browser based games were starting to flower, but then the spammy stuff took over and their popularity dropped like a rock. I would hazard a guess that the overhead of navigating to a specific site and the clunkiness inherent to browsers being a 1024-in-one multitool doesn’t help matters. It’s nicer to just fire up Steam and have all your games neatly listed, all free of extraneous browser chrome and whatnot.
astlouis44 5y ago
What engine are you building it with?
- softfalcon 5y ago
  Experimented with several. Have used Unity, Godot, and doing my own stuff using Three.js as well. Mostly prototyping and “spike” research into the key architecture bits to make sure everything will meet my needs.
  - astlouis44 5y ago
    Interesting, also I noticed you're also Alberta based like my team and I. We should chat, our WebAssembly browser games startup is hiring! Discord link: https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8 https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8
coldtea 5y ago
>Players who play the high profile games that web assembly would allow you to make games for (think Fortnite, CS:GO, etc) all want to play games from a trusted download from a trusted store, not some random website. People just don't want to invest/search for random new games on random websites. For games people want to play, and already have heard about, it wouldn't matter if they are on a website or a "trusted store". If Fortnite was made available to play only from a website starting tomorrow nobody would have a problem using it from https://www.fortnite.com https://www.fortnite.com as opposed to Epic's game platform. And for games sold by big companies, it also wouldn't matter. It's about trust (which Valve or Epic has), not about web vs a launcher/store. If devs can get that trust, then getting users to play the game on the web is not a problem. >but for many many games (source: my wife is a game designer and I'm a game programmer/web dev) that still entails at least 1 GB of data that would need to be loaded and is difficult to cache client side in the browser. You also need to download/cache that 1GB or 10GB if you use Valve or whatever. As for caching it client side in the browser, you can do it as well, either as browser cache (browser vendors will just add the technologies for that), or as locally downloaded assets with direct access granted from the browser (the article already talks about using a new API for mmapping-style access to files outside the browser).
- softfalcon 5y ago
  I think you may have missed the part in my original comment where I agree with you but use the example of Roblox or Minecraft instead.

kitsunesoba 5y ago

> Market research and testing has shown that users dislike "just playing" a game in the browser. This is particularly true in the AAA segment that webassembly and its perf gains would best serve. > Players who play the high profile games that web assembly would allow you to make games for (think Fortnite, CS:GO, etc) all want to play games from a trusted download from a trusted store, not some random website. No doubt this is partially thanks to the numerous game-like ads that link to exceptionally cheaply made web games. I remember a time in the late 00s and early 10s when browser based games were starting to flower, but then the spammy stuff took over and their popularity dropped like a rock. I would hazard a guess that the overhead of navigating to a specific site and the clunkiness inherent to browsers being a 1024-in-one multitool doesn’t help matters. It’s nicer to just fire up Steam and have all your games neatly listed, all free of extraneous browser chrome and whatnot.

astlouis44 5y ago

What engine are you building it with?

softfalcon 5y ago
Experimented with several. Have used Unity, Godot, and doing my own stuff using Three.js as well. Mostly prototyping and “spike” research into the key architecture bits to make sure everything will meet my needs.
- astlouis44 5y ago
  Interesting, also I noticed you're also Alberta based like my team and I. We should chat, our WebAssembly browser games startup is hiring! Discord link: https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8 https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8

coldtea 5y ago

>Players who play the high profile games that web assembly would allow you to make games for (think Fortnite, CS:GO, etc) all want to play games from a trusted download from a trusted store, not some random website. People just don't want to invest/search for random new games on random websites. For games people want to play, and already have heard about, it wouldn't matter if they are on a website or a "trusted store". If Fortnite was made available to play only from a website starting tomorrow nobody would have a problem using it from https://www.fortnite.com https://www.fortnite.com as opposed to Epic's game platform. And for games sold by big companies, it also wouldn't matter. It's about trust (which Valve or Epic has), not about web vs a launcher/store. If devs can get that trust, then getting users to play the game on the web is not a problem. >but for many many games (source: my wife is a game designer and I'm a game programmer/web dev) that still entails at least 1 GB of data that would need to be loaded and is difficult to cache client side in the browser. You also need to download/cache that 1GB or 10GB if you use Valve or whatever. As for caching it client side in the browser, you can do it as well, either as browser cache (browser vendors will just add the technologies for that), or as locally downloaded assets with direct access granted from the browser (the article already talks about using a new API for mmapping-style access to files outside the browser).

softfalcon 5y ago
I think you may have missed the part in my original comment where I agree with you but use the example of Roblox or Minecraft instead.