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Comment by astlouis44 | Hacker News Reader

Don't know why Unity is pursuing cloud, you're still going to need a good network speed. They'd be better served investing further in WebGL support, specifically in reducing the file binary size so we can have lightning fast load times for console-quality games running at near native performance in the browser.

Shameless plug, my startup is working on exactly this at the moment but for Unreal Engine 4, but we have plans to bring this tooling to Unity as well. The web has the opportunity to become the #1 distribution platform of choice for real time 3D developers, and it's the path to the decentralized metaverse.

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Ten years ago I thought that people would stop installing random indie games onto their computers and just play these small games in the browser. It never happened, people trust Steam, Gog, Epic and Itch.io more than they trust the web. Instead the web became increasing bloated and the ads and tracking became unbearable.

When Unity do streaming, it wont be through a browser, it will be a dedicated app that users trust. (like Netflix).

The value proposition of streaming is not that its on the web, it's that you don't need expensive hardware.

It is hard for WebGL to pick up, when the tooling is even worse than OpenGL for 3D debugging (use the native ones they say), and you are at the mercy of the browser to choose between software and hardware rendering depending on the client's hardware setup.

Unity is pursuing cloud because there is such a large opportunity. Even in the world you imagine where WebGL games take off multiplayer net code, matchmaking, server hosting, live ops, etc. could remain large markets.

Today, most large game companies do many of these things in-house — by offering services to solve some of these challenges Unity is hoping to lower the barrier to entry for smaller developers to compete and convince the larger ones that they would be better off using managed services instead.

WebGL is only good for shader toy, ecommerce and Flash like games from 10 years ago.

I wouldn't bet on a technology stack frozen in 2012 hardware capabilities, where I cannot be certain if the users can use my 3D renderings at all if they are misfortune enough to be on a mix of hardware, OS or GPGPU whose browser decided the best thing to do for user's safety was to switch to 3D software rendering.

The problem with the browser is that it is too bloated. Even if you manage to get performance with wasm you are still high up on a huge dependency tree that you'll never be able to climb down from.

As electricity prices go up we need to get closer to the metal, OpenGL might not be good but it's the best tool we have and probably will ever have. Vulkan might replace the middleware but the OpenGL API will survive.

As for the metaverse it does not depend on one implementation, but a bunch of file formats and network protocols, I'm pretty sure this protocol will prevail: http://github.com/tinspin/fuse

What’s your startup? I’ve been looking for something like this, the current state of web export from UE/Unity is very bad

How long do you think it will be before "good network speed" is available widely enough to be profitable?

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