Maybe it's as simple as "Steam is the money pipeline, and everyone makes native games on Steam."
- WebGL is a subset of ES 3.0, when the hardware can do GL ES 3.2
- WebGPU, when it arrives sometime during 2022, it will be a 1.0 MVP of the features from Metal, Vulkan and DX 12, with yet another shading language that looks like a mix of C++/HLSL/Rust, WGSL.
- If you just want compute, now WebGPU is the only option, although GL ES 3.2 has it. After two failed attempts from Intel, Chrome folks managed to force everyone to use WebGPU instead, so that is ready when WebGPU is ready.
- Lack of tooling, to debug WebGL you have basically to debug the browser process and try to track down your 3D calls from the browser own ones (there is a SpectorJS, which is quite simple when compared against something like Pix or REnderDoc)
- Browsers black list consumer's hardware/software, so content producers have no idea how well it actually runs.
- Indie game development moved from Flash into mobile, where tooling is much better.
Finally, I leave you the Flash demo for Unity 3 using CrossBridge[0] and Stage 3D [1], back in 2011.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQiUP2Hd60Y
[0] - https://adobe-flash.github.io/crossbridge/
[1] - https://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actions...
https://classic.minecraft.net/
Mobile Safari:
- Forever lacked >WebGL 1.0
- WebGL very slow compared to native
- Won't let you use accelerometer, motion control, etc., because "Privacy" (but privacy loving Apple was totally going to scan our iPhone photos until we all raised hell...)
- Web Audio stack breaks games in interesting ways desktop doesn't. "Oh, we don't let you load .mp3 audio samples by default like desktop browsers can...."
Android Chromium:
- Has 200-300ms audio latency on many devices. Here's a demo where touching/clicking the squares should have instant response (try it on desktop) but many Androids have the lag:
> https://classic.minecraft.net/
I think that site just doesn't grok touch. Tech-wise, I believe it would run okay on modern phones if the controls were sorted out.
Curse of Monkey Island: https://personal-1094.web.app/scummvm.html (press esc key right away upon load to skip straight to playing)
Baldur's Gate 2 demo: https://personal-1094.web.app/gemrb.html
Diablo demo: https://d07riv.github.io/diabloweb/
Humongous Arts games:
Spy Fox in Dry Cereal demo: https://thatgamedev01.itch.io/spyfoxindrycereal
Pajama Sam demo: https://thatgamedev01.itch.io/pajama-sam-3
Even if you can get the game's renderer and UI to reach parity, it's hard to overcome the UX and network effects of Steam. And that sort of ecosystem fragmentation (alternative platforms often don't offer crossplay) is bad for gamers, not to mention having to implement different multiplayer pipelines makes lives harder for devs.
Gaming on the web might be nice for trashy flash like games, but for anything more, why would anyone waste time on that when there's much better curated experiences on Steam, or barring that, mobile app stores and Switch? There are already enough excellent indie games to last several lifetimes. Not gonna waste time exploring the dark corners of the web to try some amateur's experiment with webgl. If they're not on an established game platform by now, I could only assume the devs care about their philosophies more than end user experience, and it would be a subpar experience even if I got the graphics to load (big if).
Even something like GeForce Now (cloud rendered streaming games) use Steam and Steamworks APIs for the community and multiplayer APIs. It's therefore much better than competitors like Google Stadia (which is pretty much dead and has no community). GOG has a niche but only for single player games. For multiplayer it's either Steam or dead matchmaking.
Maybe a more interesting comparison is something like boardgamearena or boardtopia, which offer not just simple games but also the marketplace and matchmaking features of their own. They have established their own communities finding a niche (digital low fi board games) that Steam has neglected.
WiFi is also still not up to par just quite yet. Maybe wifi 6?
Now Blender is really good we’re seeing a lot more indie games exploring low-poly 3D aesthetics. Further the increasing viability of using more compact formats like SDF hopefully means we see even more people realising they can actually build something on the web.
You can even plug a keyboard and mouse in and use all our game editors.
Steam isn't a major consideration once you've gone into the weeds of implementing software that colors outside the usual browser lines.
For example this IFC-in-browser thing looks amazingly useful: https://twitter.com/ifc_js/status/1462880392915083269
Shameless plug, but my team and I are on a mission to solve this for Unreal Engine developers looking to export their projects to HTML5. The potential for the gaming and metaverse opportunity in the browser is enormous, so to this end we're bringing the full power of UE4/UE5 to WASM, in combination with WebGPU + WebXR to deliver experiences that rival anything on Steam or other storefronts or app stores.
In addition to our hosting platform for deploying, maintaining, and monetizing, we offer a suite of tools for optimization that include compression for drastically reduces file sizes, and on the fly asset fetching to keep load times as short as possible. The goal is near native performance, with faster deployment and accessibility than Steam.
For developers and creators, there's no unnecessary 30% cut of your virtual worlds and real-time 3D applications to walled gardens. Add in that you only have one codebase to main that when deployed, it just works everywhere with a browser.
For users, play is a single click away, no local installs or dedicated clients required on computers or mobile.
Link to our website: https://www.theimmersiveweb.com/
Link to our Discord: https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8
https://docs.unity3d.com/2021.2/Documentation/Manual/webgl-g...
there are several other unity only web game sites and lots of others with not just unity