[tw061023]

That's one part of it, yes. A browser API providing a few GBs of persistent storage with proper isolation and user management, obviously with some kind of compression/decompression going on to save both download times and loading times.

As an example, consider Infinity Blade, the poster child of mobile gaming: released in 2010, 595 MB download, 948 MB installed. Even the first version of WebGL is capable of providing this kind of experience, we just cannot get it to the user via browser.

[pjmlp]

I found out another fellow soul, that is exactly one of my complaints with Web 3D, the failure to 15 years later to provide the same experience as Infinity Blade, used by Apple to show off iPhone's OpenGL ES 3.0 capabilities.

Or Unreal Engine Citadel demo, originally done in Flash / C++.