Thanks for the correction - I'll update my post shortly.
My team and I are current working on Unreal Engine WASM support, with WebGPU integration on the way. Personally, I believe native games on the web is going to disrupt Steam and the app stores and enable a whole new distribution channel for developers, especially indies. No 30% cut, works on any device with a browser.
1. Steam provides a system for user accounts and profiles
2. Steam handles payment securely for both buyers and sellers
3. Steam handles social networks/friend list/multiplayer
4. Steam allows you to have all your games in one place
5. Steam is a platform for reviews
6. Steam has its own internal economy/marketplace
He's addressing the problem with your hypothesis that "native games on the web will disrupt Steam" by pointing out that you're comparing apples (a technology platform) and oranges (a distribution channel). Steam doesn't exist because games don't use WASM.
I can't imagine I'd use Steam much after that. (And I guess facebook would do the same.)
As for payments, I already pay mostly through Google pay or through paypal. Steam isn't adding a huge amount of value.
Why you expect your Unreal-to-WASM product to succeed when Epic Games can simply build your entire product as a feature of the engine? You are building on their platform and not an open web stack, after all.
Despite having an open web, most people have elected to use platforms. At some point, people will defer revenue for simplicity.
https://www.theimmersiveweb.com/
This appears to be a 3rd party attempt to bring UE4/5 to the web.
I'd love to hear OP's take on how they think they can outpace or complement Epic on their own internal implementation. At face value I don't see how this isn't a f.lux vs. Night Shift type situation, where the official feature destroyed the market for third parties.
8. Has a platform for modding (Workshop)
9. Has sales every few months
10. Has festivals that give new games exposure to a big audience
The list goes on... It's always better to have more competition, but anyone trying to disrupt Steam has several big challenges ahead, not just running games on the browser. I imagine Steam could start offering games in WASM as well.
Hard to disrupt Steam if they're taking 10-15%, and I assume Valve still makes a mint at that price point because Steam is ~all they make.
Problems with *traditional* games via WASM/WebGPU in the browser
* Many games are 10-100gig+ in size. The browser provides no good way to store this data for your game and the fact that you had to wait 15mins to multiple hours means you gain no advantage. Further, browser have a balance to keep between letting any site put gigs of data on your machine vs not. And on top of that, the browser provides no way to prevent losing the data. The user clicks "refresh" or something similar and now the user has to re-do that 10-100gig download.
* Browsers have to work around driver bugs and it takes time to fix them and get them through the release cycle. For a native game, if a new driver come out that breaks something you can try to work around it immediately. That's harder on browsers. Your game can try but it's a moving target.
* Browsers change stuff that affects perf more often than native. Today "for = i to N" is faster than for of, tomorrow "for of" is faster (not a real example). My point is, in my experience, it's much easier to optimize for native since you're writing native code. In WASM you're not. Further, you're closer to the metal in native. Today video -> texture is fast, tomorrow it's slow, the next day audio is no longer allowed without a click, etc... I guess I don't have any stats which change more, browser APIs or native. My gut though is that I've had to change browser content often to keep it running
* Running games on any device is mostly fiction. Users range from 3090s to 7yr old intels to 7yr old androids. From touch screens, to mouse and keyboard and with other different limits (no fullscreen on iOS, no pointer lock, ...). Depending on your game that's half your market.
In other words, IMO, games you generally find on Steam are not a good fit for the browser.
On the other hand, you could design games that load fast, start up fast, possibly stream data if they need more, etc and you could possibly make some hit games. Maybe even some of the biggest hit games ever. Remember when Farmville was #1?
Still, my feeling is UnrealEngine in particular, is not a good match for making web friendly games. Most game devs won't pay attention to what it would take to make a web friendly game. Instead they'll just follow the patterns for native games and pick "Export to Web" and basically put out a very poor experience for web.
It took about 10 years between 1.0 and 2.0 for WebGL broader adoption.
And in any case they are hardly available on game consoles.
For web games it doesn't really matter how big the entire game is, only how much data it consumes per second of game play, the local storage is just another caching layer not meant to hold the entire game but just the data that's most likely needed next. As long as the user's average bandwidth is higher than what the game needs to keep the 'disc cache' filled it's fine.
Of course this means the entire asset-streaming, and probably the whole game needs to be designed around this 'number of bytes per second to be presented to the user' limitation, but that's not a new thing. In the past, games were designed around CD-drive bandwidth and seek times.
As to your other points, I mostly agree, the browser is a too unstable platform, and the people building the web APIs (other than WASM and WebGL/WebGPU) usually don't care much about games.
But there's a huge space below what's called "AAA" which still can make absurd amounts of money (and provide absurd amounts of fun), and for which the tech limitations in browsers are okay-ish. Those games need to be designed from the ground up for running in the browser, porting existing modern games will mostly not work.
(also there are more places to buy DRM-free games than only GOG - e.g. itch.io, Zoom Platform, GamersGate and Humble Store to name a few - though GOG has most of the games)
That said, I'm not super familiar with the world of game development and distribution. While web-based games have great distribution, the "best" technology or product doesn't necessarily win. Steam has massive power as an incumbent in the space, it does provides a useful service of facilitating discoverability for indie games, and there's definitely some scenarios where web-native games don't make sense [1].
No, it replaces the need to install something on your computer.
For trying out an unknown game, I rather have a sandboxed web application, than having to install something.
And most who think more in terms of convenience, will prefer the non install solution, too.
Installing new software is a big hurdle to many non technical people. I witnessed many children tears, because their parents did not wanted some game to potentially mess up their computers.
(and some games actually do that)
Erm. Yes, but wasn't your point that indie developers can market directly(without those plattforms) with ease right now?
"WebAssembly only replaces the auto-updater part. The actual value that Steam adds is discovery and trust"
Using webassembler brings in trust. Worried parents do not have to approve installing another unknown app.