And now you're back to 2006 era performance on a good day. 72 Mbit/s would be considered a pretty good internet connection. It's also the speed of a PS3's blu-ray drive.
People have been complaining about the 80-100MB/s on the outgoing generation of consoles for a long time now. Regressing by ~10x isn't a compelling argument.
> Or just an installation progress bar. What's the problem?
Without background downloads or updates? Every time someone wants to play your game, they're forced to stare at a progress bar that can easily take upwards of an hour depending on the game ("smaller" 3d games like subnautica push 10GB)? And you somehow don't see the problem?
> I assure you the costs for a minimally successful game are minuscule when compared to the 30% cut Steam takes.
And I assure you that you don't have to deploy on steam, either. You can both be a native game and get all the benefits of it and not pay anyone an app store fee! You don't have to suffer the web's treadmill of being a decade+ behind to have that.
If it's loading faster than user "consumes" assets, it doesn't matter how fast it is. It's not different for native games that allow you to play earlier than the whole thing finishes downloading.
>And you somehow don't see the problem?
Don't stupidly update the entire thing every time? Send deltas? Don't update as often? As for not having background updates it's a minor issue anyway (I for example don't start Steam unless I'm going to play), and there are Progressive Web Apps and Service workers to solve this issue.
>You don't have to suffer the web's treadmill of being a decade+ behind to have that.
Whoever needs the latest features can of course use a native platform. For developers who don't need the latest features or especially heavy graphics, WASM+WebGPU will be a viable option. That's all.
>You can both be a native game and get all the benefits of it and not pay anyone an app store fee!
And the user has to risk trusting me executing native code, which would definitely lower conversion rate.
AAA titles are already constrained by hard drive bandwidth, which is measured in Gbps on newer systems. They can’t keep all assets in memory. You’re going to have to have a top tier internet connection to get the same performance.
On top of that a browser thread can’t rely on having much more than half a gig of RAM assigned to it.
AAA titles are famously heavy in both GPU and CPU loads, and nobody is proposing to run them in a virtual machine, especially in the 32 bit one. ( memory64 is at the proposal stage)
With lazy loading? Or just an installation progress bar. What's the problem? The user has to click on the permissions dialog, allowing extended space usage, and that's it.
>reliable, super-fast internet connection
It wouldn't need a connection more reliable than what Steam requires for proper functioning.
>along with paying for the CDN to host it
I assure you the costs for a minimally successful game are minuscule when compared to the 30% cut Steam takes.
What you lose is the exposure that a release on a store like Steam gives you. That's not an insignificant problem, and is much more problematic than all the technical stuff you've mentioned.
>Why struggle to fight with the incredibly pathetic limits of a web browser when you can just stream a video?
Answered in a different comment.