There’s nothing stopping you selling downloadable games on your own web store either. The hard part is actually reaching an audience and then monetisation (and chargebacks). The ‘Steam effect’ is very diluted these days but a hell of a lot stronger than going without which is why everyone is still there.

And I’m extremely pro-web games!

Nope and it's even easier now that Web3 standards like ERC721s and Ethereum exist. It's a few lines of code to make it so that users can sign and pay with crypto, so you don't have to go through third party gatekeepers.

That just adds a further complication that you need to find people that want to spend ETH on a game download rather than a speculative asset to hold or flip.

100% agree and when WebGPU comes out, that's going to reduce performance differences by a ton.

Yeah, WASM and WebGL could use a fresh boost like that. Once they get proven in games we can finally start getting rid of legacy stuff like HTML, CSS, JS and start innovating again.

Any resources on using WebGL with WASM? Most stuff I find seems pretty mediocre projects. I feel like we'll have to wait for WebGPU.

Our team is building out upgraded support for UE developers that want to target WebAssembly. Here's a link to our Discord server:

https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8

100% this. With all the talk of web3 and gaming, WebGPU + WASM + WebXR is the path forward to the metaverse.

No walled gardens asking for a 30% cut, direct embedding of games inside a developers site, and for players they don't have to install anything locally. This is what my startup is building with our browser-games platform.

The fact that by having a wallet you already have an pseudonymous account with every dapp that will ever exist is an exciting concept. Likewise, the developers don't have to really think about authentication or authorization or payments.

Link to our Discord: https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8

Link to our website:https://www.theimmersiveweb.com/

No one responded to your comment asking for these links.

You know you can just host game installers on your website today right? A big part of Steam's value is that you don't have to build your own distribution infrastructure, which you will still need even if your game is just a big ass WASM file.

Who wants to download a client when you can just select a hyperlink and jump straight into the game?

And who is hosting the content of that hyperlink? Where's the 'decentralized' in all this?

I can't imagine it will be easy to get low latency silky smooth 90FPS+ out of WebXR, even with a pure WASM app. Being at the mercy of the Chrome devs sounds like a challenge.

Web games are usually more casual. When the user is sold on the gaming proposition you can offer them a native client.