[brreakdown]

How easy is it really though to "port a game from native to web" ?? The success is game-dependent - some games require too much processing and can't come to browser without suffering huge drawbacks - drawbacks that would change the games experience too much and gather a negative review - the difficulty here is maintaining great gameplay etc ( or maintaining that which makes the game great ) on web - this challenges the process in ways that are different per ported game - meaning some games are easily ported and others aren't - and if web is just a window with internet and a game inside it - then why deviate from something like Steam? Steam is essentially the same thing - games accessible online in a window - however they have no dependence on the browser - just the network connection and your machines components - this gives space for any game to run at optimum

[Ace17]

> then why deviate from something like Steam?

Maybe, portability (don't have to build three binaries) and security (VM sandboxing)?

However, the performance hit (I'm using emscripten/asmjs) isn't negligible (and the browser introduces some lag), which means there's no way I'm dropping native build support for my games.

It could be a new business model: play the web version immediately for free, buy the native version if you want speed/smoothness.

[milesvp]

Porting is always a pain in the ass, it's one of those things where you're much better off compiling to all the platforms that you think you care about as you go, and make sure it's part of your continuous integration process, as well as your regression testing. If you do this for enough platforms, there's a good chance that when you want to port to a new device the code will be agnostic enough to work with much less tweaking.

This is also why people tend to use a framework like Unity, or a language like Haxe both of which allow you to write once, compile lots of places. I don't have much personal experience with either, but Haxe pops up in a lot of threads where indie developers hangout, and even AAA game devs seem to use Unity.

I suspect it's sort of the same problem that Java has, where it's write once, debug everywhere, but there are people who swear by them, and I suspect that once you get some experience you tend to avoid writing code that causes cross platform debugging headaches in the first place.

[erikpukinskis]

I have zero experience here, except that I'm playing a lot with the web technologies on side projects...

My sense is: not easy. WebGL is fantastic, JavaScript can perform great it you are smart about it, and you can compile anything to ASM.... But none of those techniques are automatically a good fit for a game architecture designed on Windows or Playstation. For things to work well, you have to design for the web technologies from the start, everything from gameplay to assets has to take into account the limits of the web platform.

But, if you do it right, the web is the only place where you can get things like instant boot, continuous deployment, and lots of other goodies.