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Comment by AshleysBrain | Hacker News Reader

For those interested in HTML5 games on Steam, our HTML5 engine Construct has supported Steam publishing with NW.js for some years now - here's a selection, all built with HTML5 too:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/332250/The_Next_Penelope/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/317250/Airscape__The_Fall...

https://store.steampowered.com/app/412660/Klang/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/293240/Cosmochoria/

If you thought there weren't HTML5 games on Steam, it's probably because they're so good nobody notices.

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A bit off topic, but the creator of Airscape had a blog a couple of years ago about the difficulty in making money from their indie game: ‘Good’ isn’t good enough - releasing an indie game in 2015 [1].

[1] http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DanielWest/20150908/253040/Go...

There is a super accurate statement in that article:

We made a game that nobody wanted to buy

Everything else is trying to convince the reader that the above wasn't a failure on their part. There is an ever growing saturation of games (and music and books and indeed all consumable entertainment) - and success is down to a combination of making something that people want to play and making sure that those people know about it. One of the two things alone is insufficient tbh.

They did then go on to get nearly 2000 "very positive" reviews, which is indicative of many more sales. I think they did well in a sale later down the line.

Slightly directed at a sibling comment, but yes indie games (can) make a significant amount of revenue through non-release sales, even at heavy discounts. For example, Dustforce more than doubled its cumulative revenue through a 50% steam sale and inclusion in a Humble Bundle: http://hitboxteam.com/dustforce-sales-figures

I'm pretty sure the way this works nowadays if that your launch bombs you throw your game into as many bundles/deals as possible so I'm guessing those sales are at 5-10% of the original MSRP at best.

I've never heard of this game. Indie game devs feel like marketing isn't something they need to do because their game is good enough on its on.

It's not.

Nice!

How does it compare to Phaser?

I always had the feeling Construct was more of a full-fledged thing like Unity and Phaser was more of a framework, but on the parts they both try to solve, what do they do differently?

That's about right. Phaser is a framework, and Construct is a full-fledged IDE. Its main feature is a drag-and-drop system for game logic rather than programming, so it's more designed for making game development accessible to a non-technical audience (so not sure how many HN folk will be in the market for that, although it's still great for rapid prototyping or fast development).

Construct 3 is browser-based so you can give it a spin here: https://editor.construct.net/

Do you happen to know if it's possible to publish a game on Steam using Phaser?

Sure. The Greenworks library lets any JavaScript game integrate with Steamworks in NW.js or Electron: https://github.com/greenheartgames/greenworks

It is; here's a very brief "how to".

http://www.andy-howard.com/phaser-to-steam/

You can publish NWJS/Electron apps for steam. You can plug a Phaser game into an NWJS/Electron app.

So yes.

This is a multi-player space battle game where you can construct your AI rules for the ships. It's very cool:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/449140/Istrolid/

Since it's HTML 5 based, you can play here as well:

http://www.istrolid.com/

The nice thing about HTML5 games based on NW.js is that in most (all?) cases you can start the game in developer mode and tinker around with chrome's developer tools.

Count me as someone that was unaware that HTML5 games were of that quality now. Very cool. Do you happen to know of a comprehensive list of HTML5 games on steam?

It is not a comprehensive list, but here's are list of some of the games that are using the JS Steam plugin developed by the developers of Game Dev Tycoon.

https://github.com/greenheartgames/greenworks/wiki/Apps-game...

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