[noam_compsci]

Web gaming might be a decent incremental revenue source (< 10%) for big developers or the main distribution channel for small studios that will never make it big.

But it will never be more than that.

1. Game ops is too entrenched in mobile. The entire stack (user acquisition, analytics, monetisation) is tried and tested on mobile. These are difficult problems that seem easy to port to web games, but “devils in the detail”. Eg When you’re waiting on appsflyer to ship an update to properly attribute reinstalls for 6 months and end up wasting 25% of your UA budget during that time.

2. Consumers don’t want web games. The UI just isn’t there yet. You misclick out of a tab and lose progress or get distracted / start browsing another tab. Also to do with the ephemeral nature of a browser tab.

3. Unity’s dev network effects are too large. People who know how to make games use unity. People who want to make games therefore learn unity. It’s a flywheel.

4. Something psychological about downloading an app and seeing it on your Home Screen leads to retention.

Source: 7 years game dev and each studio I’ve worked in has been paid multiple tens of thousand dollars to port a game to web. Metrics were never anywhere near as good.

[jampekka]

I'm sure there are problems with web games, but some of your arguments seem stem from ignorance about the modern web tech[1].

> 2. Consumers don’t want web games. The UI just isn’t there yet. You misclick out of a tab and lose progress or get distracted / start browsing another tab. Also to do with the ephemeral nature of a browser tab.

Fullscreen mode mostly solves the misclick problem. PWAs solve it entirely. Do consumers care at all about what the underlying technology is.

> 3. Unity’s dev network effects are too large. People who know how to make games use unity. People who want to make games therefore learn unity. It’s a flywheel.

There's Unity web. And people who really know how to make games can also use e.g. Unreal, which as compiled for web for ages.

> 4. Something psychological about downloading an app and seeing it on your Home Screen leads to retention.

PWAs can install to Home Screen.

[1] There is admittedly one company unable to implement modern web tech.

[noam_compsci]

Just played around with a PWA on iOS and added it to Home Screen. Works really really nicely and so it seems pwa have come along a lot since I last looked into them! Thanks for the prompt to update my understanding.

I do disagree in the developer point though. Those who know unity really do not translate well to unreal. Totally different languages and ecosystems. Also unity web has always really really sucked for anything other than gimmick games.

[antifa]

I'm not sure about the specifics of UE/Unity/Godot but I was under the impression that a Hello World in any of those for the web would be about 20MB where as the Three.js game I'm working on will be at most 1MB when done (not counting game music soundtrack).

[nazcan]

While I'm sure it wouldn't be easy, it sounds like an opportunity for disruption.