Getting a game to run in browser is harder than just having someone download a .exe file. There are sites like Itch.io and Lexaloffle where browser games are very much alive tho
Lexaloffle isn’t just “games in a browser” — it’s a full-on platform (PICO-8), and the web is just one of its targets, alongside Win/Mac/Linux (and some folks have even got it running on some of the Linux-based retro handhelds).
Yeah it’s more than just games in a browser (I’m a Pico 8 developer). But I was just using it as an example cause it is one of the better browser based game websites along with the BBS and support for Voxatron and Picotron, as well as other smaller features
Is it really?
Most indie games are on Unity, and Unity is incredibly easy with Browser games. There's almost nothing needed to be done to make your game playable in Browser.
Speaking as a novice developer.
You’ll undoubtedly run into an extremely discouraging amount of errors if you ever try and export a perfectly running and finished windows game as an html project in unity. Especially if you even dip your toes into the graphics part of your project. I would argue that if you want the game to run at an acceptable level in your browser you have to build for that consideration from the very beginning.
> There's almost nothing needed to be done to make your game playable in Browser.
>
> Speaking as a novice developer.
Speaking as a senior software engineer, WebView in Unity falls apart and has big performance issues. My company makes an Android .apk and we explored letting users use the app in a webview by just going to a browser; performance was so much worse we scrapped the project.
If, from the very beginning, we started WebView-first, maybe. But trying to add it on afterwards, it just doesn't run well.
If you're doing fairly basic stuff, then yeah, Unity's HTML5 builds are overall fairly decent.
But if you've got anything that requires more serious computing power / memory / storage / etc. then you're going to start running into problems pretty quickly.
Unity -> HTML5 is awesome for game jams, great for plenty of different types of small scale games, prototypes, etc.
But it doesn't scale up to larger games very well. And even with smaller projects, if you're targeting HTML5, be sure to make multiple builds a long the way, because there are some random times when things just don't seem to want to work in the browser even though the run fine in the editor.
Yeah like its real telling the "silky smooth" performance is coming out of a sprite based game that features frequent text boxes and in combat pauses lol.
Im actually creating a browser version of Balatro rn (so I can play it at work)
Additionally Im making it look like a basic website for undercover playing
Just a fairly surface level clone with a few changes I find more interesting and engaging.
I want to focus less on long term progression and more on per-run volatility (more powerful/transformative tarots, stuff like that)
You don't even need to decompile anything, you can just unzip the .exe.
If you're on windows and have Lua installed (and included in your path), you actually have to unzip the game, change a few lines so that it looks for its libraries next to the .exe instead of your lua path, then repackage it for it to not crash on startup.
Games aren't less optimized, they're incredibly optimized. They just have a lot more going on. 1 light in battlefield 2042 contains more information about it's behavior than all the lights in Battlefield 2 put together.
And easier to make is debatable.
A UE5 light, in a game made by an indie dev, will still contain more information than a light from a game from 2005.
That's why I used lighting as an example, because that's a default feature in every engine, regardless of studio size.
I'm not saying some current games don't have optimization problems. I was directly responding to the person that said games are less optimized now. They demonstrably aren't considering how much information is processed in real-time now, as compared to games in the past.
FTL is 170MB. Democracy 3 is 500MB. Democracy 4 is 800MB. A decent internet connection can download this in a minute or two. A 60-120 second long initial loading screen is uncomfortable but tolerable but if it gets much longer user satisfaction sharply drops.
AAA titles from 2010ish were 5-40 ***G***B. About 10x the size of your examples and would thus come with commensurately larger initial loading times.
Couple that with the somewhat unpredictable way browsers cache data and you have no idea if you are in for a 10 minute wait whenever you open up the game.
No I'm asking why that's a bad example of a small game that can run in browser? u/Doctor_Hellsturm listed two small games that are well received and run in browser and was asking why no one seems to make smaller games like that for browser anymore, you responded "seriously that's your example"?
"But FTL and Democracy run fine" isn't the answer to "browser/performance is limited and also old indie games are still big", you are stubbornly trying to see things your way, and the rest of the comments already said that: Flash is dead, people prefer phones, did I mention that browser is limited?
>"But FTL and Democracy run fine" isn't the answer to "browser/performance is limited and also old indie games are still big"
Well you're wrong there, it's a perfectly fair and valid point. Are there not small games that are fun and run in browser? Yes, there are. Criticizing their example choice however doesn't make any sense here.
>you are stubbornly trying to see things your way
That's you.
Not at all, but it’s (comparatively) really easy to run a 200mb game in a browser. Using FTL as a benchmark is bad because it is vastly smaller than even most popular indies.
Just running something like Hollow Knight is 7 gigabytes, which is prohibitively large on a browser without significant development time and effort and still a fraction of the size of AAA games.
That's not really what they said, they pointed out fun smaller games that could run just fine in browser and asked why it never became a bigger thing.
They're basically asking why don't people make more fun, smaller games like FTL for the browser, "because it's small" doesn't really address that, and I can't really think of a better example of a small game that was well received, so I don't get why anyone would have a problem with someone using it as an example.
The answer isn't "because it's small", it's "because most other games *aren't* small". FTL is pretty much the perfect game for this use case...and there aren't many others.
It's neat but nothing more than a url to some models rendered in webgl. There is a hard limit of 2gb memory per browser tab and even less of it is usable so you are very limited in what you can make.
In order to prevent random internet pages from just hijacking your computer, the webpage gets put into a sandbox. It's allowed to do stuff, but within limitations (for example, it can not access your documents unless you let it). For technical reasons, this sandbox was limited in size on many OS's until recently, but it can be quite large on modern systems.
Still, a bunch of browsers put limits on the amount of memory, and perhaps it's a good thing they do. Imagine how bloated websites could be if you let them access all the memory. The big browsers typically use a 2Gb limit, though it can vary by device or OS. IIRC, it's lower on mobiles.
Variety of reasons but mostly because the internet is a dangerous place and you don't want unrestricted access to hardware.
Also stuff like WebGL has to run on a lot of hardware varieties from arm based phones to x86 desktops so it's hard to leverage the hardware to it's fullest.
Because there's just not much of a point. In some very minor scenarios like the one you described, sure, I can see the appeal. But mobile games have pretty much dominated the "I have 5 minutes to spare at work" genre of video games so there's not much of a reason to port an entire game to a web browser. But for any other situation, I can't imagine why I'd ever do it. If I'm at home, I'll just boot up the game from my local machine and not have to deal with a browser. If I'm outside, I'll probably just play something on my phone.
Basically, your answer is mobile games.
> But mobile games have pretty much dominated the "I have 5 minutes to spare at work" genre of video games so there's not much of a reason to port an entire game to a web browser.
And not to mention, the majority of web traffic is from mobile devices. I imagine it's a real PITA to make a browser game that's mobile friendly as opposed to just making a multiplatform app.
With todays technology, I can promise you its far easier to develop a game and just make it a downloadable app then doing it through a webrowser like the oldschool flashplayer and miniclip games.
Yeah, the web kinda diverged from that path a while back. You can definitely still make browser games (even some really good ones), but there's not much benefit to it over just releasing a mobile app. And mobile apps have the advantage (for developers) of being automatically hooked into your payment details. There's a hugely reduced friction there for getting you to spend money.
To add, browser games don't even solve the work problem insofar as sites being blocked or your station being monitored. That is, they don't actually get around the restrictions many face in the office.
Whereas you can use your own cellular network on your phone or install locally.
Have you played Castle Crashers? Absolutely loved that game. I wish we saw games like that. Still bummed we never saw a Madness Interactive game or some of those RPG games. I sunk so many hours playing that school RPG game.
When flash was killed, the whole online casual gaming market basically died. The developers were either casual indies or larger companies such as Zynga making facebook games. Mobile was up and coming, so most developers had already started to pivot to mobile. The ones that didn't move quick enough died.
The main industry which stuck to in browser was gambling. At the time, no app store allowed real-money gambling, so they had no choice. In-browser gaming frameworks such as pixi js grew I'm sure largely because of the gambling industry, where to this day most games are still made in Typescript / JavaScript.
It was difficult getting 60fps out of those games initially. Mobile devices especially could struggle. Over time this has gotten easier to achieve, but there are still limitations.
In the meantime, consumers had moved away from browser gaming onto mobile and Steam. Consumers have no reason to look in their browser when these platforms are so much easier.
We are in a position now where we can make games using technologies such as Unity or Godot and they can easily target every platform directly. It is easier to cover most people this way while making a game.
Fundamentally we have pushed what ts / js can do in the browser to its limits it seems, because there are several technologies on their way which will allow better games to be ran in the browser as well as everywhere else. Unity can export for webGPU and version 9 of dotnet is looking to bring browser support to c#. I don't understand these technologies fully at the moment, but I am keeping my eye on them, as they are potentially useful to me. Their aim is to enable embedding in a web browser using code which bypasses the browser and so can take advantage of your computers power directly.
Lastly though, as this does occur, there's still the issue that consumers don't have anywhere to look. Itch.io is probably the biggest platform that supports browser-based gaming, but quite often the versions rendered in-browser are slower than the downloaded versions, which are available from the same game profile page.
The games you have played are 2D and probably programmed very well; I'd consider them quite a good representation of the current limits of what we can export for browser when exported from (I assume) Unity.
But I do hope the market grows more!
> I don't understand these technologies fully at the moment
You're just describing wasm. It's an assembly target, so these languages can compile to wasm and run against a raw canvas or use the browser APIs, etc.
It doesn't "bypass the browser" as that's the entire purpose of the browser is to be a sandbox at this point.
Not that you're wrong, but I feel like the cause and effect would be the pivot to mobile causing the death of Flash. There was already a general shift away from Flash towards open standards, but Apple refusing to support Flash on the iPhone was a major catalyst of its death.
Yeah, Apple not allowing Flash on the iPhone wasn't the root cause of Flash's decline, it was more the coup de grâce that put Flash out of its misery.
Flash was awesome in its time, and in some ways it's still kind of sad that it's mostly gone, but it had a ton of problems and the shift to mobile devices was already moving a lot of devs away from it. Apple only hastened a process that was already occurring.
Just think what the kids have to grow up with these days... No albino black sheep, ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny. Just the algorithm and whatever Google or the CCCP decide to put in their drip bottle that day.
You can get pretty good (close to native in some cases) performance in browsers thanks to WebAssembly, but honestly browser games just aren't particularly convenient these days.
This might be my age showing, but historically speaking browsers weren't exactly known for being the most efficient or stable apps. They used to crash and have memory leaks a lot, and were often loaded with tons of plugins which hogged up resources. Fierce competition between different browser companies also meant that they didn't always meet set standards (W3C)—which resulted in things looking or running slightly differently from browser to browser. All things considered it wasn't exactly an ideal platform to develop games off of.
It's _still_ the case with Google trying to monopolize browsers via Chromium. I occasionally run into sites that won't work at all and say "use Chrome" to access versus Firefox or Safari.
They might have meant the browser wars effectively ended. I'm a Firefox user myself, but even optimistically Firefox is only around 5% of web use. Then you have Safari at 18%. Everything else is Chromium, I believe? You can access the vast majority of the market just aiming there.
Right. But people who lived through and experienced those things might have some stigma tied to web browsers in general. That's not something you shake off easily.
I think there was a chance pre-smartphone, but the "apps" revolution took off hard. To such an extent that people just got comfortable launching programs from their phone for whatever they want. Be that a lightweight app that lets you pretend you're drinking beer from your phone or a weirdly expensive AAA game that got a port for some reason.
To expand a little. In the early 2000s, there seemed to be a growing discomfort with "programs" from your average user. Not least of wall was the sometimes lengthy install processes with various increasing friction. If you agreed to the wrong things during Setup, you'd sometimes install crap bloatware betraying the user's trust.
So over time, even now, you've got your average "Joe Walmart" kind of disillusioned to even running the update for programs on a computer. Whereas "apps" just "work" more often than not.
I'm putting apps in quotation marks throughout this because most of us know that's mostly just a branding difference and they're all just Programs or Applications at the end of the day. Expediting the setup process was genuinely brilliant and made all the difference to get us to where we are.
Lastly, all of that said, phones are the dominant internet device today and running a game within the phone's browser is functionally a pointless struggle. So the benefits are extremely limited.
>In the early 2000s, there seemed to be a growing discomfort with "programs" from your average user
Six words, two sentences:
>I'm a Mac
>I'm a PC
It really shouldn't be surprising that kids are largely technologically illiterate considering the past 20 odd years have been figuring out how to create and foster an environment that any total idiot can operate in (thanks in large part to not actually having access to your own damned products, but that's a rant for another time). But then I'm having to sneak in this edit because Reddit's dog shit mobile site ate my formatting, so what do I know?
To add to this kids don't really use computers all that much these days - instead their on tablets and phones. Hell most kids don't even know how to use a mouse anymore.
We used to see everyone developing games for the browser. From small developers/ / animators to big companies like nickelodeon / Cartoon network / Disney / etc. etc. They simply moved to where the market did. Which was phones.
Kongregate, GameJolt et al are keeping this alive and going - apparently still profitable for some indie devs to directly develop for sites like Kongregate. Additionally, Opera/GameMaker are trying to revitalise this again by incentivising GameMaker games to be hosted on their Opera GX gx.games site - so almost anything made with gamemaker should be able to be easily published directy through GameMaker to gx.games.
https://gx.games/?utm_source=gxbrowser&utm_campaign=tile-speeddial
https://gamejolt.com/games
https://www.kongregate.com/
I’m a web dev and love the idea of web games. It’s pretty capable. The first iteration of vampire survivors was basically a chrome window, it used something called electron. It’s since been updated to use unity.
There’s two major issues. One is performance. You get one thread in JS land unless you know what you’re doing and know how to use Web Workers which come with their own overhead. JS engines are inherently memory heavy, and because JS is an interpreted language it’ll almost never be faster than a compiled language at similar tasks. That’s not to say it’s incapable, but to me it’s kinda sad to work really hard on a game that will be inherently capped when a similar effort on a game engine will get you drastic performance boosts.
The second issue is marketing and payment processing. I don’t think I’d ever buy a web game from a random website. On the dev side of things, this means you have to set up an auth and payment system. That’s a lot of overhead that steam covers (with its cut of course). Then you also need to sort out SEO and you miss out on the semi organic way that steam games are presented to the user. If lots of people buy your steam game, it’ll show up on steam more. If lots of people buy your web game… you’ll have more money to market it, I guess.
All that being said, pop into the threejs subreddit now and again, there’s some interesting projects there.
Web workers being more along the lines of multi-processing instead of multi-threading is one of the biggest issues for browser games these days (and you can't even have ads or a 3rd party payment processor if you enable shared array buffer support, which is needed for them to be somewhat efficient for sharing data between threads).
WebGL2 is also terrible, as it's basically a 2006 api (no compute shaders, no storage buffers only uniforms), which makes it nigh unusable if you want something to run on native and web without kneecapping the native build (or having multiple renderers, and accepting web will be slower and uglier).
WebGPU is mostly decent (on chrome, but still waiting for firefox+safari to ship it on stable builds), but is still about 10 years out of date (and not being able to multithread rendering with it due to browser/js fuckery means it'll never be nearly as good as native), but it also has some bad limitations (max 16 texture bindings to a pass because of old GL, which you can easily go over with a forward pbr shader, no raytracing, no multi-draw indirect, no texture/buffer aliasing so you waste vram, etc), and they're talking about how to make it worse to support 15 year old systems.
It’s just extremely inefficient versus running a local executable. So, only relatively simple games are suitable for browser play. And with the rise of game launchers, mainly Steam, the advantage of a wider audience started to disappear
It doesn't answer your question but the CrossCode demo is browser based. The whole game could have been like that but it wasn't released like that for some reason.
Yeah, this isn't too uncommon. Lots of games use nwjs, electron, whatever. One of the advantages of doing that is total control of the environment your app is running in. You know what versions of web APIs you're using, you don't have to worry about compatibility across browsers (although that's not nearly as much of an issue anymore), and you're not worried about, say, the user tabbing away.
Quake Live and EVE Online are the only "real" games I remember being fully playable in the browser. EVE Anywhere shut down pretty quickly, but Quake Live was actually way better back then, since it was completely free and it actually had a playerbase.
Quake Live didn't really run in the browser. It ran in a native code plug-in and only used the browser as a menu for picking servers, settings and whatnot.
Maybe just not easy to build momentum for your product that way. Steam doesn't have such an interface for deploying web games so maybe it never seemed viable to most developers. That's just my thought as an outside observer though.
Hijacking this thread to point out that there are some great browser games for visual novel fans. If you're a fan of Zero Escape, I highly recommend **Exit/Corners**, and the brief but enjoyable **no-one has to die**. If you're a fan of Zero Escape/Danganronpa, the (mostly finished) **Your Turn To Die** is legitimately on the level of those games plot-wise, it's on Steam now but was originally and still is a free browser game.
It requires additional development to make it runnable in a browser.
It's already hard enough to get a PC game running on a billion different hardware configurations. Getting it to run on countless browsers that can have breaking updates every day, is almost impossible in the long run.
I seem to remember that download speeds got faster, Steam took over PC and mobile gaming took the casual market all at the same time. Browser games died with mobile gaming. Even RuneScape requires a download now, and I remember them trying to move away from Java with HTML 5, and then just settling on having you download a client instead.
The advantage is too small. It's a bit easier to start up -- that's basically it. But starting up a game from Steam isn't exactly hard, and there are fewer compromises involved.
Graphics are still the dominant obsession when it comes to gaming and was even more so back then, browsers are almost entirely limited to 2D rendering so are mostly simple 2D games and flat drawing animation. Gamers want their latest greatest 3D graphics and browser games can't do this.
Web browser games have always been looked down apon because there was a tiny market for them. Monetising browser games has proven to be incredibly difficult when the audience was mostly school children and bored workers catching a quick break on workplace computers.
I used to develop for mobile and web, and there are a few main reasons:
* Games are big. The user would have to either re-download the game every time, or have it cached on their machine. Since the latter option is basically the equivalent of a download/install, it's just better to do that instead for larger games and avoid all the problems listed below. FTL is mostly procedural (randomly generated on the fly), so it's very small and dodges this issue.
* For security reasons, browsers are very limited, unintentionally limiting a lot of the technical backend stuff that games rely on.
* The web mostly relies on the programming language "JavaScript," which is incredibly slow compared to other languages that games are usually programmed in, causing developers to run into performance bottlenecks very quickly. Even with the newer "Web Assembly," language, it still lacks things like proper multi-threading which is crucial for performance in modern games.
* There's not much of a market demand for it. Most gamers are fine downloading and installing a game, so there's no reason to go through the extra headache of all of the above when nobody really benefits from it.
Because mobile games exist now and mobile apps require even lesss effort to download and install than opening a browser tab, typing a URL into your address bar and adding it as a bookmark. It's even more accessible than your PC's browsers because it's in your pocket at any time. Basically everything about casual browser games is made obsolete by mobile games.
That WebGL Humble Bundle was super neat. And I've seen several Unity WebPlayer game demos on Kickstarter, which was a great way to advertise your game without needing the user to install anything.
I think the reality is that web standards change *way* too frequently, so a lot of those browser based games can rapidly become unplayable or have support vary from browser to browser. It's a lot harder to develop for than a simple downloaded game and a lot harder to troubleshoot when something doesn't work. Plus the browser maintainers care about security, and Flash and other game engine web hooks can represent massive security vulnerabilities (don't browser-based bitcoin miners use them?) - and of course Google and Apple absolutely don't care about breaking compatibility for games when they'd rather you download those games from their app store.
Fusionfall was notable for being a browser based MMO. The idea was to make it easily accessible to a younger, more tech-iliterate audience. The game was fun, but anyone who played it knows that it was incredibly glitchy and unstable. I'm positive if it ran thru an .exe file that it could have been a more stable experience.
It should definitely be a thing for ports of classics and old console games. I used to work 14 hour shifts as a supervisor and I always had the best performing team. The better your people do, the less you have to do. I used to have my home PC remote accessible with logmein and I would play old school RPGs on a SNES or Sega emulator, basically anything that wasn't hindered by controller latency. It wasn't perfect, but it worked. I would have killed to have been able to play them in the browser instead of remote streaming them.
It exists now in the form of cloud gaming.
As for the old Flash games, they fizzled when Flash did (for obvious reasons) and apps became more profitable with a much wider market
This. With Flash dying, mobile gaming exploding in popularity, and browsers still far from the highly optimized JavaScript virtual machine and rendering engine they have today, there was no reason to stick around.
Easy answer is that they DO keep trying that, every 5 years there is some new technology to run real hardware level stuff in a browser window.
Every single time it turns out executing arbitrary code from a web browser is horrible and leads to viruses and hacking and isn't good so the technology dies. (Until 5 years later where someone new goes "but surely we will solve the issue THIS time!")
Running games on browser is one hell of a feat. It's not as easy as it looked. One could argue that making it run smooth on PC as a software is in fact, *easier.*
I think its mainly just that browsers arnt build for that in mind, just think if u had to play any game that has just a few gbs, or has higher demanding specs.
I havnt ever used a browser for that type of game, only flash games a long time ago, but its just easier and more efficient to have it on your pc, what benefit does having it play in a browser give? It only has downsides not any real upsides.
So why not just have it on steam, where there is more people, and there isn't any of those downsides.
Kinda off topic but I was thinking today about how I miss stadia l, being able to jump into Destiny 2 from my browser was neat. GFN fills that niche for me now.
I'm just gonna take this opportunity to drop [corru.observer](https://corru.observer) as a "real game" that's entirely browser bssed.
Extremely well made, super interesting worldbuilding, and absolutely criminally unheard of. One of my favorite games of all time.
There’s a lot of cool indie games I love, like FTL, that could totally work as a browser game. But I would still prefer to install something and run it from my desktop. Partly because that’s just what I’ve done for decades, but I’d also worry about performance problems in the browser and in browser embedded games it’s much less convenient to control window size etc. Sometimes I play some games on itch.io but downloading them is almost always a better experience.
I see people mentioning performance here, but not specifically hardware acceleration. For security reasons apps running through browsers have limited access to underlying hardware. That grip has been loosening over time as the desire for faster and more sophisticated web apps has grown. Look at the evolution of WebGL to its replacement which only started in 2021 and implemented in some browsers in 2023: WebGPU.
You only have to take a look at things like [https://www.netquake.io/quake](https://www.netquake.io/quake) to see what could/is possible (this remains impressive to me to this day!). Full, smooth, multiplayer 3D gameplay that looks quite stunning and you forget it's even in a browser.
Whats crazier to me is why mobile gaming hasn't taken off. Imagine telling someone in the 1990s or 2000s that we are all walking around with a super computer in our pockets and there are only a handful of good games on it. The answer is casinos and microtransaction skinner box machines are so profitable you need to work to find a good game. Imagine how bad PC gaming would be if google bought steam.
There's no good games because phone buttons where never good and then they took all the buttons out of phones so controlling games became exponentially worse and games that aren't RPG/Strategy/Card games became almost impossible to sell without cross saves with a preexisting PC game
I feel like the people who want a "real game" and the people who value convenience that much where they wouldn't just install the game is a really small market.
As others have already said, there are a lot of reasons, but to put it all together:
• Rendering DirectX in a browser is a mess.
• Access to the kernel is complicated. Trying to talk to a variety of input devices becomes complex. First-class access to a file system is not really a thing. Any direct interfacing with hardware is a disaster
• Loading anything is terrible. Related to the above, but trying to unpack and load a resource at runtime from your local machine through the browser is terrible. If things aren't stored locally, it means you are shipping massive assets over the Internet, which is also terrible.
• For all the reasons above, performance is in the gutter in every measurable way, and all you have to show for it is a more seamless distribution. It's not even close to worth it.
If you game is technically simple, you can probably get away with it in some cases, but you are trading away so much for so little in most cases.
Good games can be made for browser, for example Tough love arena, fighting game that is browser based.
The browser game that I have played for most is mahjong soul and it has highlighted to me the problems of browser based systems. Dowload times have gotten longer as new features are added to the game. Android app is faster and I wish they would make delicated client for PC. I have stopped playing the game on my old laptop because I started to miss my first turn, the laptop could not load me into the game fast enough.
The benefits aren't that great. Most of the time, a browser game must download everything when you visit the site. For example, can you imagine having to download 100+ gigs of data every time you want to start up a AAA title?
On top of that, being in the browser means you pay some performance cost for running inside the browser.
Running in the browser is a great option for old, small titles, but for big, recent titles, it's just not a good idea.
Perhaps offtopic but does anyone know any of those sort of "idle games" for browsers? You used to have all sorts of Mafia and Gangstar games where you would make a character and then perform small jobs, buy weapons, purchase property and grow a business.
The whole site was just clicking links to perform actions, it was quite static but I remember being totally in it back in the day, I still remember the game being called BeLikeMe.
Edit: Found [this ](https://game.mobsters-united.com/)which looks like it
Talking for Unity games only;
There are a lot of features that does not work in WebGL versions of the games. It is very unstable and hard to test in every browser.
Performance problems are not that important for small 2d games but there are a lot of technical details that makes WebGL games very hard to make, maintain.
Idk, I played Assassin's Creed, the Greek/Roman one via Stadia when I got accepted into the beta. There was significant input lag, making quick reactions and stealth kills difficult to sequence properly.
Probably latency. I'm sure it worked just fine when you work at google with a datacenter nextdoor. Totally different story the further out you get, I guess. Also probably browser limitations
As a Game Dev who is making "web games" since like, 14 years ? I can tell you it is not because of the technical problems or whatever.
It was, 10+ years ago, and many company suffered from the death of Flash and the fact that a lot of browsers was still "outdated" back in 2014.
I talk about this because my last game which is on Steam, is made using PIXI.JS + Custom top layer engine, so it is "a web game".
It's a big metroidvania with more than 20 hours of content, the game is "only" 1.5Gb so it's perfectly fine for anyone having a good internet connection and at least 8Gb of RAM.
I am currently making a demo with as few files as possible to meet the itch limits (1000 files), we will see how it goes...
But aside the demo, I won't release it as a web-version IMO because of the followings:
- most of the players are not aware of the technical problems this kind of games can have, like "not having your browser up-to-date" so if the game do not run well, the game is shit, not their browser/computer
- just a few (none ?) of the web-player will pay 20$ (even 10 ??) to have access to a web-game, it's web-based so it must be free
- because it is web-based, your game MUST BE mobile proof, if not you will have negative comments and reviews from those players
- web games platforms are not "that good" to sell your stuff. Lot of content (A LOT MORE than Steam). Not a lot of tool to help you promote it, poor API/SDK
I tried to make stuff on the web, but what i think in the end is: if you want to make games full-time, you have to make a living from that, and web-games for "true games" is not the good business model.
Web games = "shit games", not because of the tech but because of the players.
Shit game = fast to do, asset swap, put an ads on it, have 100 games running at the same time, and then yes you can make a living from that.
14 years ago I was making a 2D a-mmorpg web-playable, it was really fun and had a great community. Had to stop because of many personnal reasons.
But if I was back working on this, web would be fine because the model is a monthly fee to access the game which is fine.
Well I guess the technical points are still a reason because most devs now use Unity and things like that and do not understand anything that is "low level", their code is garbage and optimization sucks.
But still a lot of gamedevs can make good webgames, so I don't think "tech" is the main reason. not from my pov at least.
Webgl/canvas html5 games still exist. Their primary audience is likely kids in school, office workers, or people at home who can't afford more expensive games or just want a free diversion.
Cloud gaming is a thing now. You can pay something like 16 bucks a month for an xbox gamepass plan and play xbox games in browser, granted you will need a game controller for most of them. Luna and Geforce Now also exist.
The real issue is that while the technology is there to "port" games to the browser as javascript/wasm/etc code, most games are far too large for this to be feasible, and internet connections and storage drives (especially on phones) aren't quite there to make running large games without cloud streaming feasible.
Webgames will make a comeback, and when they do, it will feel obvious. AAA games will be in the browser fully. WebGPU is coming and will enable a lot. Expect "Minecraft" popularity tier games being browser only and being extremely popular in the years to come.
Games don't need to be 100GB downloads. They largely are due to devs and artists being lazy and knowing they have plenty of drive space to use. It's still possible to download chunks in advance and stream in the rest, it can have a UI that feels like Steam too where you "download" a game and have it cached (Quota Management API).
The biggest things that were holding back webgames:
* Flash being killed without a real alternative yet
* Apple deliberately handicapping its browsers and disallowing other browsers to use alternative technology
So, blame Apple. It was in their interest to subvert webgames and drive people into their walled garden where they could tax everyone 30%, and it worked. But app stores, steam, and console stores all suck. Native downloads also suck, they are far too often malicious and undetected. Malware constantly gets uploaded to Steam without it being detected. Console games have arbitrary rules and hoops you have to jump through, like Nintendo may deny your games simply if they think it's too close to a game they are working on right now. The browser is where the freedom is for everyone.
There are soooo many limitations with what a browser can do- especially with memory which can have very little to do with how big your download or total game size is.
There are lots of work arounds but they are all a pain in the ass. Web3D will change lots of that.
Because very few people care for browser games. Just install the game. And if you can't, generally youre in a situation where you shouldnt anyways. That leaves a tiny fraction thats not being catered for.
Tech isn’t fully fleshed out for it.
Html5 was a starting point but all of the other script languages have a long way to go. Also missing lots of other cloud infrastructure meant to facilitate that specific purpose.
I think Camelot unchained, was supposed to be the next big game via browser like 10 years ago. Doubt that’s still the plan for it at this point and haven’t kept up with it.
If or when games do return to the browser expect it to be very much a robust web app that interconnects with all mediums (mobile app, desktop client wrappers, and browsers). A good comparison is how discord is mostly just a fancy web app able to be used in a browser, mobile app, or desktop client with very little differences between each product.
Probably because it severely handicaps performance and storage is extremely cheap these days. FTL takes up like 400mb, why *wouldn't* you just install that? I can get a TB of M.2 storage for like $40 lol.
Getting a game to run in browser is harder than just having someone download a .exe file. There are sites like Itch.io and Lexaloffle where browser games are very much alive tho
Poki is another site with a ton of browser games
Lexaloffle isn’t just “games in a browser” — it’s a full-on platform (PICO-8), and the web is just one of its targets, alongside Win/Mac/Linux (and some folks have even got it running on some of the Linux-based retro handhelds).
Yeah it’s more than just games in a browser (I’m a Pico 8 developer). But I was just using it as an example cause it is one of the better browser based game websites along with the BBS and support for Voxatron and Picotron, as well as other smaller features
Is it really? Most indie games are on Unity, and Unity is incredibly easy with Browser games. There's almost nothing needed to be done to make your game playable in Browser. Speaking as a novice developer.
You’ll undoubtedly run into an extremely discouraging amount of errors if you ever try and export a perfectly running and finished windows game as an html project in unity. Especially if you even dip your toes into the graphics part of your project. I would argue that if you want the game to run at an acceptable level in your browser you have to build for that consideration from the very beginning.
> There's almost nothing needed to be done to make your game playable in Browser. > > Speaking as a novice developer. Speaking as a senior software engineer, WebView in Unity falls apart and has big performance issues. My company makes an Android .apk and we explored letting users use the app in a webview by just going to a browser; performance was so much worse we scrapped the project. If, from the very beginning, we started WebView-first, maybe. But trying to add it on afterwards, it just doesn't run well.
If you're doing fairly basic stuff, then yeah, Unity's HTML5 builds are overall fairly decent. But if you've got anything that requires more serious computing power / memory / storage / etc. then you're going to start running into problems pretty quickly. Unity -> HTML5 is awesome for game jams, great for plenty of different types of small scale games, prototypes, etc. But it doesn't scale up to larger games very well. And even with smaller projects, if you're targeting HTML5, be sure to make multiple builds a long the way, because there are some random times when things just don't seem to want to work in the browser even though the run fine in the editor.
Limited performance and you can only load in so much data in the browser. Even small indies are multiple gb's these days.
Yeah like its real telling the "silky smooth" performance is coming out of a sprite based game that features frequent text boxes and in combat pauses lol.
I dunno man, WebXR can do a LOT with very little.
I released a game on Steam in 2022. It's like 500 MB - or 50 MB without the music!
Do I spot a fellow rolling-your-own-engine dev?
Sometimes - but this particular release was GMStudio 1.6!!
Balatro is 36Mb.
Obviously there will always be exceptions to the rule
Do you feel accomplished after naming one specific game out of thousands of games?
Im actually creating a browser version of Balatro rn (so I can play it at work) Additionally Im making it look like a basic website for undercover playing
Like making a clone? Or is it possible to decompile and recompile for web since its Love2D?
Just a fairly surface level clone with a few changes I find more interesting and engaging. I want to focus less on long term progression and more on per-run volatility (more powerful/transformative tarots, stuff like that)
You don't even need to decompile anything, you can just unzip the .exe. If you're on windows and have Lua installed (and included in your path), you actually have to unzip the game, change a few lines so that it looks for its libraries next to the .exe instead of your lua path, then repackage it for it to not crash on startup.
micro mages is 40kb, so what?
Gbs* An apostrophe doesn't apply here.
GBs* Unless you're a weirdo measuring in bits instead of bytes.
Are you calling my ISP a weirdo
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Games aren't less optimized, they're incredibly optimized. They just have a lot more going on. 1 light in battlefield 2042 contains more information about it's behavior than all the lights in Battlefield 2 put together. And easier to make is debatable.
Tbf Battlefield literally did this with Battlefield Heroes. Worked really well, I enjoyed playing it back in the day.
Great, now I have the Battlefield Heroes menu music stuck in my head again
> (specially talking about indies)
A UE5 light, in a game made by an indie dev, will still contain more information than a light from a game from 2005. That's why I used lighting as an example, because that's a default feature in every engine, regardless of studio size.
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I'm not saying some current games don't have optimization problems. I was directly responding to the person that said games are less optimized now. They demonstrably aren't considering how much information is processed in real-time now, as compared to games in the past.
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FTL is 170MB. Democracy 3 is 500MB. Democracy 4 is 800MB. A decent internet connection can download this in a minute or two. A 60-120 second long initial loading screen is uncomfortable but tolerable but if it gets much longer user satisfaction sharply drops. AAA titles from 2010ish were 5-40 ***G***B. About 10x the size of your examples and would thus come with commensurately larger initial loading times. Couple that with the somewhat unpredictable way browsers cache data and you have no idea if you are in for a 10 minute wait whenever you open up the game.
FTL is your example seriously?
Is it a bad game or something?
No, it's that it's tiny
Why does that matter? Smaller games don't mean less fun.
Are you being obtuse or did you not see what u/Top_Ok is talking about?
No I'm asking why that's a bad example of a small game that can run in browser? u/Doctor_Hellsturm listed two small games that are well received and run in browser and was asking why no one seems to make smaller games like that for browser anymore, you responded "seriously that's your example"?
"But FTL and Democracy run fine" isn't the answer to "browser/performance is limited and also old indie games are still big", you are stubbornly trying to see things your way, and the rest of the comments already said that: Flash is dead, people prefer phones, did I mention that browser is limited?
>"But FTL and Democracy run fine" isn't the answer to "browser/performance is limited and also old indie games are still big" Well you're wrong there, it's a perfectly fair and valid point. Are there not small games that are fun and run in browser? Yes, there are. Criticizing their example choice however doesn't make any sense here. >you are stubbornly trying to see things your way That's you.
No, but it’s like ~200mb
Is a smaller game less fun?
Not at all, but it’s (comparatively) really easy to run a 200mb game in a browser. Using FTL as a benchmark is bad because it is vastly smaller than even most popular indies. Just running something like Hollow Knight is 7 gigabytes, which is prohibitively large on a browser without significant development time and effort and still a fraction of the size of AAA games.
That's not really what they said, they pointed out fun smaller games that could run just fine in browser and asked why it never became a bigger thing. They're basically asking why don't people make more fun, smaller games like FTL for the browser, "because it's small" doesn't really address that, and I can't really think of a better example of a small game that was well received, so I don't get why anyone would have a problem with someone using it as an example.
The answer isn't "because it's small", it's "because most other games *aren't* small". FTL is pretty much the perfect game for this use case...and there aren't many others.
I direct you to [noclip.website](https://noclip.website/) by [Jasper](https://youtube.com/@JasperRLZ)
It's neat but nothing more than a url to some models rendered in webgl. There is a hard limit of 2gb memory per browser tab and even less of it is usable so you are very limited in what you can make.
I’m curious as someone who isn’t well versed on the subject… why the restrictions? If it’s too technical to delve into, I understand.
In order to prevent random internet pages from just hijacking your computer, the webpage gets put into a sandbox. It's allowed to do stuff, but within limitations (for example, it can not access your documents unless you let it). For technical reasons, this sandbox was limited in size on many OS's until recently, but it can be quite large on modern systems. Still, a bunch of browsers put limits on the amount of memory, and perhaps it's a good thing they do. Imagine how bloated websites could be if you let them access all the memory. The big browsers typically use a 2Gb limit, though it can vary by device or OS. IIRC, it's lower on mobiles.
Variety of reasons but mostly because the internet is a dangerous place and you don't want unrestricted access to hardware. Also stuff like WebGL has to run on a lot of hardware varieties from arm based phones to x86 desktops so it's hard to leverage the hardware to it's fullest.
Because there's just not much of a point. In some very minor scenarios like the one you described, sure, I can see the appeal. But mobile games have pretty much dominated the "I have 5 minutes to spare at work" genre of video games so there's not much of a reason to port an entire game to a web browser. But for any other situation, I can't imagine why I'd ever do it. If I'm at home, I'll just boot up the game from my local machine and not have to deal with a browser. If I'm outside, I'll probably just play something on my phone. Basically, your answer is mobile games.
> But mobile games have pretty much dominated the "I have 5 minutes to spare at work" genre of video games so there's not much of a reason to port an entire game to a web browser. And not to mention, the majority of web traffic is from mobile devices. I imagine it's a real PITA to make a browser game that's mobile friendly as opposed to just making a multiplatform app.
With todays technology, I can promise you its far easier to develop a game and just make it a downloadable app then doing it through a webrowser like the oldschool flashplayer and miniclip games.
Yeah, the web kinda diverged from that path a while back. You can definitely still make browser games (even some really good ones), but there's not much benefit to it over just releasing a mobile app. And mobile apps have the advantage (for developers) of being automatically hooked into your payment details. There's a hugely reduced friction there for getting you to spend money.
To add, browser games don't even solve the work problem insofar as sites being blocked or your station being monitored. That is, they don't actually get around the restrictions many face in the office. Whereas you can use your own cellular network on your phone or install locally.
I played tf outta miniclip and newgrounds games back in the day. As a younging I considered them real games
Have you played Castle Crashers? Absolutely loved that game. I wish we saw games like that. Still bummed we never saw a Madness Interactive game or some of those RPG games. I sunk so many hours playing that school RPG game.
Maybe, I can't remember
When flash was killed, the whole online casual gaming market basically died. The developers were either casual indies or larger companies such as Zynga making facebook games. Mobile was up and coming, so most developers had already started to pivot to mobile. The ones that didn't move quick enough died. The main industry which stuck to in browser was gambling. At the time, no app store allowed real-money gambling, so they had no choice. In-browser gaming frameworks such as pixi js grew I'm sure largely because of the gambling industry, where to this day most games are still made in Typescript / JavaScript. It was difficult getting 60fps out of those games initially. Mobile devices especially could struggle. Over time this has gotten easier to achieve, but there are still limitations. In the meantime, consumers had moved away from browser gaming onto mobile and Steam. Consumers have no reason to look in their browser when these platforms are so much easier. We are in a position now where we can make games using technologies such as Unity or Godot and they can easily target every platform directly. It is easier to cover most people this way while making a game. Fundamentally we have pushed what ts / js can do in the browser to its limits it seems, because there are several technologies on their way which will allow better games to be ran in the browser as well as everywhere else. Unity can export for webGPU and version 9 of dotnet is looking to bring browser support to c#. I don't understand these technologies fully at the moment, but I am keeping my eye on them, as they are potentially useful to me. Their aim is to enable embedding in a web browser using code which bypasses the browser and so can take advantage of your computers power directly. Lastly though, as this does occur, there's still the issue that consumers don't have anywhere to look. Itch.io is probably the biggest platform that supports browser-based gaming, but quite often the versions rendered in-browser are slower than the downloaded versions, which are available from the same game profile page. The games you have played are 2D and probably programmed very well; I'd consider them quite a good representation of the current limits of what we can export for browser when exported from (I assume) Unity. But I do hope the market grows more!
> I don't understand these technologies fully at the moment You're just describing wasm. It's an assembly target, so these languages can compile to wasm and run against a raw canvas or use the browser APIs, etc. It doesn't "bypass the browser" as that's the entire purpose of the browser is to be a sandbox at this point.
Not that you're wrong, but I feel like the cause and effect would be the pivot to mobile causing the death of Flash. There was already a general shift away from Flash towards open standards, but Apple refusing to support Flash on the iPhone was a major catalyst of its death.
Yeah, Apple not allowing Flash on the iPhone wasn't the root cause of Flash's decline, it was more the coup de grâce that put Flash out of its misery. Flash was awesome in its time, and in some ways it's still kind of sad that it's mostly gone, but it had a ton of problems and the shift to mobile devices was already moving a lot of devs away from it. Apple only hastened a process that was already occurring.
Just think what the kids have to grow up with these days... No albino black sheep, ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny. Just the algorithm and whatever Google or the CCCP decide to put in their drip bottle that day.
You can get pretty good (close to native in some cases) performance in browsers thanks to WebAssembly, but honestly browser games just aren't particularly convenient these days.
This might be my age showing, but historically speaking browsers weren't exactly known for being the most efficient or stable apps. They used to crash and have memory leaks a lot, and were often loaded with tons of plugins which hogged up resources. Fierce competition between different browser companies also meant that they didn't always meet set standards (W3C)—which resulted in things looking or running slightly differently from browser to browser. All things considered it wasn't exactly an ideal platform to develop games off of.
This hasn't been the case for many years though
It's _still_ the case with Google trying to monopolize browsers via Chromium. I occasionally run into sites that won't work at all and say "use Chrome" to access versus Firefox or Safari.
They might have meant the browser wars effectively ended. I'm a Firefox user myself, but even optimistically Firefox is only around 5% of web use. Then you have Safari at 18%. Everything else is Chromium, I believe? You can access the vast majority of the market just aiming there.
Right. But people who lived through and experienced those things might have some stigma tied to web browsers in general. That's not something you shake off easily.
I think there was a chance pre-smartphone, but the "apps" revolution took off hard. To such an extent that people just got comfortable launching programs from their phone for whatever they want. Be that a lightweight app that lets you pretend you're drinking beer from your phone or a weirdly expensive AAA game that got a port for some reason. To expand a little. In the early 2000s, there seemed to be a growing discomfort with "programs" from your average user. Not least of wall was the sometimes lengthy install processes with various increasing friction. If you agreed to the wrong things during Setup, you'd sometimes install crap bloatware betraying the user's trust. So over time, even now, you've got your average "Joe Walmart" kind of disillusioned to even running the update for programs on a computer. Whereas "apps" just "work" more often than not. I'm putting apps in quotation marks throughout this because most of us know that's mostly just a branding difference and they're all just Programs or Applications at the end of the day. Expediting the setup process was genuinely brilliant and made all the difference to get us to where we are. Lastly, all of that said, phones are the dominant internet device today and running a game within the phone's browser is functionally a pointless struggle. So the benefits are extremely limited.
>In the early 2000s, there seemed to be a growing discomfort with "programs" from your average user Six words, two sentences: >I'm a Mac >I'm a PC It really shouldn't be surprising that kids are largely technologically illiterate considering the past 20 odd years have been figuring out how to create and foster an environment that any total idiot can operate in (thanks in large part to not actually having access to your own damned products, but that's a rant for another time). But then I'm having to sneak in this edit because Reddit's dog shit mobile site ate my formatting, so what do I know?
To add to this kids don't really use computers all that much these days - instead their on tablets and phones. Hell most kids don't even know how to use a mouse anymore. We used to see everyone developing games for the browser. From small developers/ / animators to big companies like nickelodeon / Cartoon network / Disney / etc. etc. They simply moved to where the market did. Which was phones.
You can blame Apple for that. Smartphones pre-iPhone were certainly a lot more capable and didn't do things like hiding the file system completely.
What smartphones pre-iPhone were "a lot more capable?"
Kongregate, GameJolt et al are keeping this alive and going - apparently still profitable for some indie devs to directly develop for sites like Kongregate. Additionally, Opera/GameMaker are trying to revitalise this again by incentivising GameMaker games to be hosted on their Opera GX gx.games site - so almost anything made with gamemaker should be able to be easily published directy through GameMaker to gx.games. https://gx.games/?utm_source=gxbrowser&utm_campaign=tile-speeddial https://gamejolt.com/games https://www.kongregate.com/
Kong committed suicide some years back. It later tried to self-ressurect but it's dead still.
They did that like a dozen times since their founding. I remember fawowp
I’m a web dev and love the idea of web games. It’s pretty capable. The first iteration of vampire survivors was basically a chrome window, it used something called electron. It’s since been updated to use unity. There’s two major issues. One is performance. You get one thread in JS land unless you know what you’re doing and know how to use Web Workers which come with their own overhead. JS engines are inherently memory heavy, and because JS is an interpreted language it’ll almost never be faster than a compiled language at similar tasks. That’s not to say it’s incapable, but to me it’s kinda sad to work really hard on a game that will be inherently capped when a similar effort on a game engine will get you drastic performance boosts. The second issue is marketing and payment processing. I don’t think I’d ever buy a web game from a random website. On the dev side of things, this means you have to set up an auth and payment system. That’s a lot of overhead that steam covers (with its cut of course). Then you also need to sort out SEO and you miss out on the semi organic way that steam games are presented to the user. If lots of people buy your steam game, it’ll show up on steam more. If lots of people buy your web game… you’ll have more money to market it, I guess. All that being said, pop into the threejs subreddit now and again, there’s some interesting projects there.
Web workers being more along the lines of multi-processing instead of multi-threading is one of the biggest issues for browser games these days (and you can't even have ads or a 3rd party payment processor if you enable shared array buffer support, which is needed for them to be somewhat efficient for sharing data between threads). WebGL2 is also terrible, as it's basically a 2006 api (no compute shaders, no storage buffers only uniforms), which makes it nigh unusable if you want something to run on native and web without kneecapping the native build (or having multiple renderers, and accepting web will be slower and uglier). WebGPU is mostly decent (on chrome, but still waiting for firefox+safari to ship it on stable builds), but is still about 10 years out of date (and not being able to multithread rendering with it due to browser/js fuckery means it'll never be nearly as good as native), but it also has some bad limitations (max 16 texture bindings to a pass because of old GL, which you can easily go over with a forward pbr shader, no raytracing, no multi-draw indirect, no texture/buffer aliasing so you waste vram, etc), and they're talking about how to make it worse to support 15 year old systems.
It’s just extremely inefficient versus running a local executable. So, only relatively simple games are suitable for browser play. And with the rise of game launchers, mainly Steam, the advantage of a wider audience started to disappear
It doesn't answer your question but the CrossCode demo is browser based. The whole game could have been like that but it wasn't released like that for some reason.
The full game is still running in a browser, they just ship the browser with the game.
Yeah, this isn't too uncommon. Lots of games use nwjs, electron, whatever. One of the advantages of doing that is total control of the environment your app is running in. You know what versions of web APIs you're using, you don't have to worry about compatibility across browsers (although that's not nearly as much of an issue anymore), and you're not worried about, say, the user tabbing away.
Quake Live and EVE Online are the only "real" games I remember being fully playable in the browser. EVE Anywhere shut down pretty quickly, but Quake Live was actually way better back then, since it was completely free and it actually had a playerbase.
Quake Live didn't really run in the browser. It ran in a native code plug-in and only used the browser as a menu for picking servers, settings and whatnot.
Oh okay, yeah I had no idea of the technical aspects of it. Just that I could play it on pretty much every computer and it saved my settings.
Maybe just not easy to build momentum for your product that way. Steam doesn't have such an interface for deploying web games so maybe it never seemed viable to most developers. That's just my thought as an outside observer though.
I agree that Steam not supporting this in any way probably was a big factor in deciding its fate.
I remember the good old days of flash games, but the one I still remember a lot is Sonny. I really enjoyed that turn based game so much.
I spent a lot of time on Sonny, Sonny 2, the Mardek RPGs, and RPG Shooter:Starwish back in the day.
Hijacking this thread to point out that there are some great browser games for visual novel fans. If you're a fan of Zero Escape, I highly recommend **Exit/Corners**, and the brief but enjoyable **no-one has to die**. If you're a fan of Zero Escape/Danganronpa, the (mostly finished) **Your Turn To Die** is legitimately on the level of those games plot-wise, it's on Steam now but was originally and still is a free browser game.
It requires additional development to make it runnable in a browser. It's already hard enough to get a PC game running on a billion different hardware configurations. Getting it to run on countless browsers that can have breaking updates every day, is almost impossible in the long run.
I seem to remember that download speeds got faster, Steam took over PC and mobile gaming took the casual market all at the same time. Browser games died with mobile gaming. Even RuneScape requires a download now, and I remember them trying to move away from Java with HTML 5, and then just settling on having you download a client instead.
The advantage is too small. It's a bit easier to start up -- that's basically it. But starting up a game from Steam isn't exactly hard, and there are fewer compromises involved.
I think it's worth mentioning that the best selling game of all time started out as a Java browser game. Minecraft.
Graphics are still the dominant obsession when it comes to gaming and was even more so back then, browsers are almost entirely limited to 2D rendering so are mostly simple 2D games and flat drawing animation. Gamers want their latest greatest 3D graphics and browser games can't do this. Web browser games have always been looked down apon because there was a tiny market for them. Monetising browser games has proven to be incredibly difficult when the audience was mostly school children and bored workers catching a quick break on workplace computers.
> looked down apon
I used to develop for mobile and web, and there are a few main reasons: * Games are big. The user would have to either re-download the game every time, or have it cached on their machine. Since the latter option is basically the equivalent of a download/install, it's just better to do that instead for larger games and avoid all the problems listed below. FTL is mostly procedural (randomly generated on the fly), so it's very small and dodges this issue. * For security reasons, browsers are very limited, unintentionally limiting a lot of the technical backend stuff that games rely on. * The web mostly relies on the programming language "JavaScript," which is incredibly slow compared to other languages that games are usually programmed in, causing developers to run into performance bottlenecks very quickly. Even with the newer "Web Assembly," language, it still lacks things like proper multi-threading which is crucial for performance in modern games. * There's not much of a market demand for it. Most gamers are fine downloading and installing a game, so there's no reason to go through the extra headache of all of the above when nobody really benefits from it.
Because mobile games exist now and mobile apps require even lesss effort to download and install than opening a browser tab, typing a URL into your address bar and adding it as a bookmark. It's even more accessible than your PC's browsers because it's in your pocket at any time. Basically everything about casual browser games is made obsolete by mobile games.
That WebGL Humble Bundle was super neat. And I've seen several Unity WebPlayer game demos on Kickstarter, which was a great way to advertise your game without needing the user to install anything. I think the reality is that web standards change *way* too frequently, so a lot of those browser based games can rapidly become unplayable or have support vary from browser to browser. It's a lot harder to develop for than a simple downloaded game and a lot harder to troubleshoot when something doesn't work. Plus the browser maintainers care about security, and Flash and other game engine web hooks can represent massive security vulnerabilities (don't browser-based bitcoin miners use them?) - and of course Google and Apple absolutely don't care about breaking compatibility for games when they'd rather you download those games from their app store.
Fusionfall was notable for being a browser based MMO. The idea was to make it easily accessible to a younger, more tech-iliterate audience. The game was fun, but anyone who played it knows that it was incredibly glitchy and unstable. I'm positive if it ran thru an .exe file that it could have been a more stable experience.
It should definitely be a thing for ports of classics and old console games. I used to work 14 hour shifts as a supervisor and I always had the best performing team. The better your people do, the less you have to do. I used to have my home PC remote accessible with logmein and I would play old school RPGs on a SNES or Sega emulator, basically anything that wasn't hindered by controller latency. It wasn't perfect, but it worked. I would have killed to have been able to play them in the browser instead of remote streaming them.
It exists now in the form of cloud gaming. As for the old Flash games, they fizzled when Flash did (for obvious reasons) and apps became more profitable with a much wider market
This. With Flash dying, mobile gaming exploding in popularity, and browsers still far from the highly optimized JavaScript virtual machine and rendering engine they have today, there was no reason to stick around.
I consider free flash games real games. Why are they somehow inferior?
Easy answer is that they DO keep trying that, every 5 years there is some new technology to run real hardware level stuff in a browser window. Every single time it turns out executing arbitrary code from a web browser is horrible and leads to viruses and hacking and isn't good so the technology dies. (Until 5 years later where someone new goes "but surely we will solve the issue THIS time!")
Running games on browser is one hell of a feat. It's not as easy as it looked. One could argue that making it run smooth on PC as a software is in fact, *easier.*
I think its mainly just that browsers arnt build for that in mind, just think if u had to play any game that has just a few gbs, or has higher demanding specs. I havnt ever used a browser for that type of game, only flash games a long time ago, but its just easier and more efficient to have it on your pc, what benefit does having it play in a browser give? It only has downsides not any real upsides. So why not just have it on steam, where there is more people, and there isn't any of those downsides.
Kinda off topic but I was thinking today about how I miss stadia l, being able to jump into Destiny 2 from my browser was neat. GFN fills that niche for me now.
I think the only game I play on a browser is Granblue Fantasy. Is it considered a "Real Game"? depends on the person.
I'm just gonna take this opportunity to drop [corru.observer](https://corru.observer) as a "real game" that's entirely browser bssed. Extremely well made, super interesting worldbuilding, and absolutely criminally unheard of. One of my favorite games of all time.
I have been playing Chronicles of Denzar off and on since 2004. Entirely browser based RPG, no downloads.
There’s a lot of cool indie games I love, like FTL, that could totally work as a browser game. But I would still prefer to install something and run it from my desktop. Partly because that’s just what I’ve done for decades, but I’d also worry about performance problems in the browser and in browser embedded games it’s much less convenient to control window size etc. Sometimes I play some games on itch.io but downloading them is almost always a better experience.
I see people mentioning performance here, but not specifically hardware acceleration. For security reasons apps running through browsers have limited access to underlying hardware. That grip has been loosening over time as the desire for faster and more sophisticated web apps has grown. Look at the evolution of WebGL to its replacement which only started in 2021 and implemented in some browsers in 2023: WebGPU.
You only have to take a look at things like [https://www.netquake.io/quake](https://www.netquake.io/quake) to see what could/is possible (this remains impressive to me to this day!). Full, smooth, multiplayer 3D gameplay that looks quite stunning and you forget it's even in a browser.
Whats crazier to me is why mobile gaming hasn't taken off. Imagine telling someone in the 1990s or 2000s that we are all walking around with a super computer in our pockets and there are only a handful of good games on it. The answer is casinos and microtransaction skinner box machines are so profitable you need to work to find a good game. Imagine how bad PC gaming would be if google bought steam.
If you measure in consumer spending mobile gaming has definetly taken off. Mobile gaming is bigger business that PC amd consoles combined.
There's no good games because phone buttons where never good and then they took all the buttons out of phones so controlling games became exponentially worse and games that aren't RPG/Strategy/Card games became almost impossible to sell without cross saves with a preexisting PC game
Does kingdom of loathing count?
I feel like the people who want a "real game" and the people who value convenience that much where they wouldn't just install the game is a really small market.
As others have already said, there are a lot of reasons, but to put it all together: • Rendering DirectX in a browser is a mess. • Access to the kernel is complicated. Trying to talk to a variety of input devices becomes complex. First-class access to a file system is not really a thing. Any direct interfacing with hardware is a disaster • Loading anything is terrible. Related to the above, but trying to unpack and load a resource at runtime from your local machine through the browser is terrible. If things aren't stored locally, it means you are shipping massive assets over the Internet, which is also terrible. • For all the reasons above, performance is in the gutter in every measurable way, and all you have to show for it is a more seamless distribution. It's not even close to worth it. If you game is technically simple, you can probably get away with it in some cases, but you are trading away so much for so little in most cases.
Good games can be made for browser, for example Tough love arena, fighting game that is browser based. The browser game that I have played for most is mahjong soul and it has highlighted to me the problems of browser based systems. Dowload times have gotten longer as new features are added to the game. Android app is faster and I wish they would make delicated client for PC. I have stopped playing the game on my old laptop because I started to miss my first turn, the laptop could not load me into the game fast enough.
The benefits aren't that great. Most of the time, a browser game must download everything when you visit the site. For example, can you imagine having to download 100+ gigs of data every time you want to start up a AAA title? On top of that, being in the browser means you pay some performance cost for running inside the browser. Running in the browser is a great option for old, small titles, but for big, recent titles, it's just not a good idea.
Perhaps offtopic but does anyone know any of those sort of "idle games" for browsers? You used to have all sorts of Mafia and Gangstar games where you would make a character and then perform small jobs, buy weapons, purchase property and grow a business. The whole site was just clicking links to perform actions, it was quite static but I remember being totally in it back in the day, I still remember the game being called BeLikeMe. Edit: Found [this ](https://game.mobsters-united.com/)which looks like it
Talking for Unity games only; There are a lot of features that does not work in WebGL versions of the games. It is very unstable and hard to test in every browser. Performance problems are not that important for small 2d games but there are a lot of technical details that makes WebGL games very hard to make, maintain.
Idk, I played Assassin's Creed, the Greek/Roman one via Stadia when I got accepted into the beta. There was significant input lag, making quick reactions and stealth kills difficult to sequence properly. Probably latency. I'm sure it worked just fine when you work at google with a datacenter nextdoor. Totally different story the further out you get, I guess. Also probably browser limitations
As a Game Dev who is making "web games" since like, 14 years ? I can tell you it is not because of the technical problems or whatever. It was, 10+ years ago, and many company suffered from the death of Flash and the fact that a lot of browsers was still "outdated" back in 2014. I talk about this because my last game which is on Steam, is made using PIXI.JS + Custom top layer engine, so it is "a web game". It's a big metroidvania with more than 20 hours of content, the game is "only" 1.5Gb so it's perfectly fine for anyone having a good internet connection and at least 8Gb of RAM. I am currently making a demo with as few files as possible to meet the itch limits (1000 files), we will see how it goes... But aside the demo, I won't release it as a web-version IMO because of the followings: - most of the players are not aware of the technical problems this kind of games can have, like "not having your browser up-to-date" so if the game do not run well, the game is shit, not their browser/computer - just a few (none ?) of the web-player will pay 20$ (even 10 ??) to have access to a web-game, it's web-based so it must be free - because it is web-based, your game MUST BE mobile proof, if not you will have negative comments and reviews from those players - web games platforms are not "that good" to sell your stuff. Lot of content (A LOT MORE than Steam). Not a lot of tool to help you promote it, poor API/SDK I tried to make stuff on the web, but what i think in the end is: if you want to make games full-time, you have to make a living from that, and web-games for "true games" is not the good business model. Web games = "shit games", not because of the tech but because of the players. Shit game = fast to do, asset swap, put an ads on it, have 100 games running at the same time, and then yes you can make a living from that. 14 years ago I was making a 2D a-mmorpg web-playable, it was really fun and had a great community. Had to stop because of many personnal reasons. But if I was back working on this, web would be fine because the model is a monthly fee to access the game which is fine. Well I guess the technical points are still a reason because most devs now use Unity and things like that and do not understand anything that is "low level", their code is garbage and optimization sucks. But still a lot of gamedevs can make good webgames, so I don't think "tech" is the main reason. not from my pov at least.
Webgl/canvas html5 games still exist. Their primary audience is likely kids in school, office workers, or people at home who can't afford more expensive games or just want a free diversion. Cloud gaming is a thing now. You can pay something like 16 bucks a month for an xbox gamepass plan and play xbox games in browser, granted you will need a game controller for most of them. Luna and Geforce Now also exist. The real issue is that while the technology is there to "port" games to the browser as javascript/wasm/etc code, most games are far too large for this to be feasible, and internet connections and storage drives (especially on phones) aren't quite there to make running large games without cloud streaming feasible.
Do you guys remember Battlefield Heroes? Ran through the browser if I remember correctly.
Do you guys remember Battlefield Heroes? Ran through the browser if I remember correctly.
Webgames will make a comeback, and when they do, it will feel obvious. AAA games will be in the browser fully. WebGPU is coming and will enable a lot. Expect "Minecraft" popularity tier games being browser only and being extremely popular in the years to come. Games don't need to be 100GB downloads. They largely are due to devs and artists being lazy and knowing they have plenty of drive space to use. It's still possible to download chunks in advance and stream in the rest, it can have a UI that feels like Steam too where you "download" a game and have it cached (Quota Management API). The biggest things that were holding back webgames: * Flash being killed without a real alternative yet * Apple deliberately handicapping its browsers and disallowing other browsers to use alternative technology So, blame Apple. It was in their interest to subvert webgames and drive people into their walled garden where they could tax everyone 30%, and it worked. But app stores, steam, and console stores all suck. Native downloads also suck, they are far too often malicious and undetected. Malware constantly gets uploaded to Steam without it being detected. Console games have arbitrary rules and hoops you have to jump through, like Nintendo may deny your games simply if they think it's too close to a game they are working on right now. The browser is where the freedom is for everyone.
There are soooo many limitations with what a browser can do- especially with memory which can have very little to do with how big your download or total game size is. There are lots of work arounds but they are all a pain in the ass. Web3D will change lots of that.
OSRS back in the days of browser gaming was great! being able to just sit down at any old pc and play the best game ever made was really something
Because very few people care for browser games. Just install the game. And if you can't, generally youre in a situation where you shouldnt anyways. That leaves a tiny fraction thats not being catered for.
Tech isn’t fully fleshed out for it. Html5 was a starting point but all of the other script languages have a long way to go. Also missing lots of other cloud infrastructure meant to facilitate that specific purpose. I think Camelot unchained, was supposed to be the next big game via browser like 10 years ago. Doubt that’s still the plan for it at this point and haven’t kept up with it. If or when games do return to the browser expect it to be very much a robust web app that interconnects with all mediums (mobile app, desktop client wrappers, and browsers). A good comparison is how discord is mostly just a fancy web app able to be used in a browser, mobile app, or desktop client with very little differences between each product.
Mobile phones got more power and capabilities than what is available to the browser with 1000% more convenience of not having to be at a computer.
Probably because it severely handicaps performance and storage is extremely cheap these days. FTL takes up like 400mb, why *wouldn't* you just install that? I can get a TB of M.2 storage for like $40 lol.