I've been working in games for the better part of a decade, at AAA scale for the last three years, and this is pure fantasy. It is extremely difficult to develop high-quality games for a console, which has fixed hardware specs and a single vendor for the SDK. Any layer of emulation on top of that creates new problems and dilutes every single aspect of performance, sometimes in unpredictable ways.

On top of that, building things that work consistently across browsers and across time is an extremely cursed problem.

Insomniac Games, makers of the new Spider-Man games, spent several years trying to port all of their development tools and workflows to be web-based and work in Chrome. And then, when they got there, it turned out to be terrible. Google would update the browser and key tools would break and nobody would know why. The tools folks had to work in Javascript, while the majority of the engine was still in C++.

The call was eventually made to migrate the tools back to native exes, which was another multi-year process, but nobody missed the Chrome tools. Clicking a bookmark in a browser turns out to be about as difficult as clicking a desktop icon, and the stability is significantly improved.

If there's a new web game disruption it won't be started by the AAA-games industry, the AAA model depends on big platform owners like Valve, Nintendo or Sony, none of them have an interest in a distribution channel they have no control over.

This is the Innovators Dilemma writ large.

"The technology can never compete", but it gets better every year.

The new Microsoft Flight Simulator is amazing, and they took that same rendering and can stream it to the browser (though not as a game as far as I understand) with Project Anywhere https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/streaming-simulation-and-t...

I'm not saying that WebGL is ready to take on AAA games today, but calling it "pure fantasy" is naive. People will never use a browser on their phones, the internet will never compete with television, electric cars can't take on gasoline, the list goes on and on.

How does Project Anywhere have any relevance to the point being discussed here? It does not run on WASM, it is not performance sensitive, it doesn't really "run" on browser.

Although I do see a future of Gaming on browser. Not everything has to be AAA 3D Games. I want retro 2D Games. Games that were even possible with good old Flash.

Have you actually tried it? I haven't seen a link to try it. We built https://ayvri.com, and we use WASM extensively (though the public site is using cesium, we've also built our own renderer which is not public).

Also, the original blog isn't only about WASM, that's just one of the technologies making this sort of thing possible.

Canva was built pre-WASM, so photoshop in the borwser, may be better with WASM, but I'd suggest it isn't a requirement.

Doesn't Nintendo sell a crapload of games written to run on a six year old mobile chip? Seems like there's a plenty large market for non-AAA games.

Yeah, with 3D abilities that no Web 3D API is capable of.

Is NVN all that different from WebGPU?

NVN is more low level than Vulkan, like LibGNM on PS.

>I've been working in games for the better part of a decade, at AAA scale for the last three years, and this is pure fantasy.

Maybe we should stop caring for AAA games then? What happened to gameplay instead of "this new game has 10% more detailed graphic assets"?

Well, I'm a gameplay programmer and I seem to always be busy somehow, so idk maybe you need to play different things?

A, the 'individual example supposed to refute general trend' fallacy...

As if I said/meant that gameplay-based games didn't exist (as opposed that the industry and market has a heavy AAA/get newest GPU/ emphasis).

Not to mention that AAA light on gameplay and full on assets also hire gameplay programmers. It's not about gameplay programmers being busy, or gameplay-heavy games existing.

It's about having many more gamers stop chasing graphics to the detriment of gameplay - or in fact, stop chasing graphics, period.

Miles Morales was dope, really nice work.

The kind of games I really like are 4x strategy games, RPGs like Skyrim that have cinema-quality graphics, and highly mechanical games like Rocket League. The mobile equivalent for those games are always hot garbage when compared with the AAA version. The strategy games and mechanical games always fall apart because kbm/controller precision can't be achieved on a touchscreen, and the RPGs fall down because the graphics suck and the screens are way too small.

Yes, also let's stop going to see Marvel movies and focus on arthouse cinema instead. I'll see you at the next Solaris (1972) screening !

Well, I'd take Solaris (1972) over any and all Marvel crap too.

And viewers in general would gain much more subtle understanding of the world, appreciation of art, mature emotions and storytelling, exposure to global cultures (not just heroes-in-spandex-Hollywood-commercial monoculture) and lots of other things besides, if they didn't watch Marvel movies and watch arthouse cinema instead.

Or, as we call it here, just "cinema" (it doesn't need a qualifier, we call the rest "Hollywood crap" instead).

Does Electron help with this?

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.

>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 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).

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.

> 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.

What engine are you building it with?

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.

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

You only deal with the Steam or EGS or Gog cut if you're utilizing their storefront; if you are just hosting the game on your own site, then whether that game is a webassembly package or a desktop application, you don't have to pay some gatekeeper (other than your file host). Same thing with Android, though there is a bit more friction there.

The "gatekeeper" in this case is Windows SmartScreen. SmartScreen will pop up a scare dialog unless the installer has enough "reputation points" by being popular or signed with an EV code signing certificate (which is a lot more expensive, and hassle to obtain and use than a regular code signing certificate). In any case, for ease of distribution nothing beats an URL which when clicked immediately starts the game.

This doesn't really solve the issues with advertising though. I believe the main reason so many developers want their games on Steam is because of the greater attention they get rather than the distribution side of things.

That said, I think the niche of casual remote party games would probably work very well here. During the height of the pandemic my friends and I started doing a lot of "remote game nights" with various different kinds of games. However since most of them rarely played games, owned macs and weren't very technically inclined, the games that had the least friction were generally the browser based ones.

Since party games by nature tend to be great at organic advertising and benefit the most from quick easy installs, I think there is a big opportunity here that not many have taken notice to yet.

This is it. What kills a game isn't its platform, but where and how you sell it. Sales and user eyeballs matter more than even what game engine you use.

We use Steam, Xbox Live, PSN, etc not because we wouldn't prefer to use our own store, but because no one cares about anything else.

Chrome has over a billion potential users of a game, and the reason it's so compelling is that fun is just a click away. Local installs of a client can be a thing of the past.

Unfortunately, choosing to not use Steam, GoG, or similar is simply out of the question.

The reality of you selling your game at a profit without the help of one of these app storefronts is improbable. Keep in mind that even if you somehow become successful in this regard, these storefronts have a vested interested in making sure you and your technologies fail.

Edit: apologies if I seem dire, I'm actually on your side and WISH that the world was a free market without all these gatekeepers. Myself, my partner, and many of my close friends constantly battle with these "gate keepers" as game devs/designers and I wish they would go away, but the market (users) love (to use) them even when they hate them.

> Unfortunately, choosing to not use Steam, GoG, or similar is simply out of the question

Sure but that situation doesn't change by simply distributing a webassembly package through a website. Or rather, that situation is no different than if you distribute a desktop binary through your website. In both cases you are eschewing the storefront.

Yeah there's lots of alternatives to the app stores for windows games. You can also just sell direct to consumer.

The real challenge with webassembly as it applies to games (at least large ones) is the asset size. AA - AAA games are 20-100 GB and that can't just live in browser cache.

Also, to be honest building a complex game and shipping it to the web is kinda crap shoot for other reasons. Games are power hungry, and don't want to be limited by browsers. Also, a browser is a massive application that sits around consuming resources that a AAA native game could use.

But of course, I imagine games will be developed differently to take advantage of the web (smaller games, streaming in levels / textures as needed, etc).

The total asset size doesn't matter much (see Google Earth which is probably backed by terabytes of data), but how much new data the game needs to present to the player per second (which means the games needs to be designed for a minspec bandwidth just like it needs to be designed for a minspec CPU and GPU).

It's pretty clear you haven't worked in that industry. Per your logic, no one should have that issue now, you can sell your games on your own site without issue (in fact you can sell your own Steam keys without the 30% fee).

It's a long way from being a usable gaming interface. There's too much "convenience UI" baked into browsers that trips up gaming. Pressed the wrong button? It was a browser hotkey for history-back and you just unloaded the game. Have add-ons enabled? Whoops they are messing up the controls.

Download time is the biggest setback for games in the browser in my experience.

That's why games running in browsers need a different approach to asset loading, instead of downloading everything upfront, stream the asset data directly from CDN when needed. It's nothing new, games had to deal with streaming data from slow mass storage devices throughout their entire history.

Our team is working on exactly this - an asset streaming system developers can utilize for Unreal Engine that only fetches what a players needs to see at any given moment, nothing more.

Combined with compression, you can get players into desktop-quality games in WASM in seconds on most computers.

That's not an option for most games. That means I now either need to be online-only with a good enough internet connection and latency to stream this game (a la Stadia but worse since it's not just video) or I need to download it into an offline cache which now brings us back to the same spot.

Traditional MMO games have the same requirements, and it works fine. Some of them also allow starting the game while only a fraction of the asset data has been downloaded and continue downloading while the game is running.

> Traditional MMO games have the same requirements, and it works fine.

I mean, no. I definitely wouldn't want to endure the waiting time I have every time I play some MMO if I'm playing a single player game.

How would the problem of huge (dozens of GB) graphics assets be solved? Is there a current/planned way to have the large WASM binaries and assets stored on the computer?

Cloud gaming also achieves this, although in quite a different way