[1] https://kotaku.com/5866594/you-can-now-play-bastion-in-googl...
This loss of control over the software i use is my main annoyance by far as a user when it comes to the trend of pushing everything as a web app.
It does[0]. It's just a spec for a bytecode, and it's designed with the intent of being run in the browser and natively.
It’d be cool if browsers let you back up local copies of sites though.
But no one minds downloading a multi-megabyte or gigabyte game over Steam or console, because users are trained to expect that to take a while.
So what's needed, in my mind, is something with a user experience between the two - for games and applications to run in something more akin to a "package manager" mode than a basic browser window. Or maybe, on the web, have some alternative content to distract the user while the content downloads.
The size of the entire download could possibly be reduced by having browsers ship with some standard plugins and modules, maybe runtimes (imagine having most of the Unity framework already in the browser.)
Maybe, just maybe, they could not run in a browser window.
You could keep all the benefits of URLs and the web, but not have to actually tie the browser down with executing in a webpage.
Steam actually offers the option to start playing before the download is complete on a few titles (not everything supports it)
Steam is already a very good solution for distributing PC games and it has the added benefit of implementing a payment model, DLC features, social capabilities, updates, cloud-synchronized saved games, and, perhaps most importantly, a discovery service for finding new games. It even supports automatic WINE mode for windows-only games in linux (a feature that surprised me).
I welcome the day when more games run automatically in OSX or Linux, but I think the need for an app platform isn't going to go away. And as someone who plays games often offline (on a plane or sometimes the train) it's really nice to not require an internet connection to play something.
I'd be interested to see how landing on a webpage with a game ready-to-go turns non-gamers such as myself into infrequent or even frequent gamers.
I would also argue that the ubiquity of the web is what makes games like agar.io and slither.io so popular, especially for kids. I remember being at techshop in SF and seeing kids rushing straight to their computers after school and opening slither.io and playing instantly. No friction. I'm sure that lends to their success.
The web is great!
Or is it f2p? So you land on page, still need to make an account for persistence. Also will need to do credit card eventually for game developer to make money. Also now game developer is looking at cdn costs of over 500 a month at a minimum for any kind of real game that is even 0.5 gb in size.
I actually own a web assembly f2p game like this. It is really not a bright future for games that compete with real client games on steam that are not tiny and have the barest performance requirements.
With unity basically the entire game needs to fit in like ~512 mb of ram, and runs poorly.
Regarding the CDN costs, with some very aggressive caching (Service Workers and stuff), is it really that much worse than a downloaded game? You're the one who actually has a game, though, so I guess there really is a problem here.
Steam is kind of a nice walled garden. The problem is that it's not the only one and that there is loads of stuff outside their walls. There's the Apple store, the Google store, the Amazon store. And that's just mobile.
A few things these stores have in common: - pay to play: they all heavily promote games that pay to be promoted. This favors games with big budgets and is a monetization problem for smaller players; like indie games. - censorship and conflicts of interest between application/game developers are a problem regularly result in applications being blocked/removed for all sorts of reasons that boil down to arbitrary restrictions imposed by the store owner. - extortion rates on monetization, in app purchases, subscriptions, etc. make being there costly. - search is a problem. Even Google's search in the appstore is comparatively shit. I regularly resort to using their web search to find apps I know definitely exist in their app store. Apples store is a maze of misdirection. Their search is shit. - Getting into the store requires a non trivial amount of work and in some cases entrance fees.
PWAs fix the distribution problem and remove app stores as a necessity for that. Google, Duck Duck go, already take care of the discovery problem better than most app stores and in any case people discover things via social media, friend referrals, etc. Being featured in the top 20 of the IOS app store is not a feasible thing for most developers. Also, browsers already keep us safe so we don't need to rely on app store screening any more.
So, time to tear down those walls once more.
The history of walled gardens is that eventually somebody climbs over the wall and figures out there is a world beyond. Biblical stuff even, if you are into that ;-).
Then again, they're consolidating faster than the T-1000 in the foundry.