> More plausible first users would be things like CAD & 3D modelling applications, which need high performance but also don't have 80GB+ installs.
These sorts of applications are already inching their way onto the web. Photo editors, video editors, 3D modelling software, game dev tools (like Godot and Play Canvas). We're just starting to move past the "toy" stage and into the "native apps which don't have a web plan need start worrying" stage, I think.
If you think this trend isn't going to continue to progressively heavier applications, including games, well... you're just wrong. You haven't been watching closely enough.
> Why would an AAA game, which typically wants every ounce of performance and control it can get, ever jump onto a web platform and lose all of that?
"Why would an AAA game, which typically wants every ounce of performance and control it can get, ever jump onto smartphones and lose all of that?"
Because they don't care about performance - they care about revenue. Performance is just a means to that end.
Call of Duty Mobile was one of the largest mobile game launches in history - more than a hundred million downloads in the first month. I'm not sure if anything has beaten it yet. They had to trade off performance, resolution, latency, bandwidth, screen real estate, and basically everything else. But the benefits were obvious: Increased accessibility and on-the-go playing being perhaps the main two.
The web offers a similar set of benefits. Arguably a super-set of those, since it encompasses mobiles too.
> And since modern consoles are the same architecture & ISAs as gaming PCs are, why would they want to figure out a WASM backend with lagging hardware support & high overhead when 100% of their users are x86-64 with the entirely same set of SIMD features?
Compilers. Even a 50% perf hit (or even more) is fine for now. The trade-offs are worth it.
> but also don't have 80GB+ installs
Asset streaming. It's the web. We stream 4GB HD movies now while we're watching them. Networks speeds are still exponentially improving. This is an engineering problem. You don't actually need the 80GB all at once - game dev tooling will adapt, or be replaced by web-first tooling which has done lazy-loading of assets from day 1.
> This use case comes up a lot, but if (and that's a big if)
All I'll say is that I'd be willing to be a lot of money that you're wrong. Really-big-budget browser games are going to land well within the next decade. Everything is basically already in place. We're already seeing web-first garage-made games like krunker.io with player counts larger than some AAA first person shooters.
Basically all mass-market consumer applications will end up as web applications. You might not like that (there are certainly down-sides), but you'd need to do a lot of explaining to explain away the very clear trends that we're seeing across the industry.