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Comment by ianlevesque | Hacker News Reader

As a gamer though, why would I want to play any of these developers' games through the browser instead of Steam?

It's a bigger deal for developers, as they don't have to give up 30% to Steam, and they can directly distribute to their end users on their own site by embedding.

Not to mention instant cross-platform availability across PC/Mac/Android and iOS. Even Xbox supports WebGL2 via the new Chromium Edge they shipped on there recently.

To detriment of players experience, because neither Web 3D APIs are a match to native hardware capabilities.

A single player title? Yeah, no thanks.

However, think of the convenience of joining your friends on a web-based Minecraft-like game. And then hyperlinking to another server with some in-game mechanic.

This is something I'm really interested in doing open source, once WebUDP is more mature.

Yep. I don't see this game-in-the-browser thing taking off anytime soon for anything serious. Player retention, and immersion, are terrible. Casual 'adware' games, maybe.

To try it out? Also to play or check in on a friend's computer or a public computer.

The ease of visiting a game like a website is sometimes preferred, depends on the game.

There's a game where the web client is mainly used to view streams of other players (instead of streaming video they mirrored the same packets they received/sent to your web client)

Aside from what others have mentioned, the browser's sandboxing makes it a lot more appealing to try out small indie/hobbyist casual games on a whim. Like the Flash game aggregators of old, or maybe itch.io today.

No downloads and the ability to easily and quickly jump into the action, especially useful for multiplayer or social games.

You're maybe not saving the game to disk, but you still have to download it. At least the assets you're going to interact with. And if you want to play again, then you keep the game/assets in a browser cache somewhere and there's not much difference with downloading and installing the game, in terms of bandwidth/diskspace

Of course, but from the user’s perspective this is all transparent. Parent comment is talking from the UX perspective.

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