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Comment by nmfisher | Hacker News Reader

I've kept an eye on WebGL/WebGPU/etc for my own app but haven't really made any moves in that direction yet. What's the market for 3d rendering in the browser at the moment (beyond your demos)? In theory it sounds nice to load up a webpage and jump straight into a game but the reality is probably quite different, what with long asset loading times and (I'm guessing) fractured userbase in terms of hardware.

I know it's your product so you're bullish either way, but a candid answer would be appreciated.

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It's not trivial, but it's absolutely possible to build an instant-loading web game with WebGL. https://venge.io is my go-to example. You can click that link and starting from zero you can see 3D rendered content in about three seconds and be shooting people in multiplayer in less than 10 seconds (on a decently fast connection).

Of course the graphics there are not competing with Unreal, but in principle it should be possible to do progressive loading of assets and reach a much higher quality over time without sacrificing that fast initial load.

I suppose my follow-up question is: is there a sufficiently large market for that type of game? Not just blue-sky thinking, I'm more wondering if there is proven demand, as of today.

Side-note: I couldn't load the game in Safari (which has amazingly poor WebGL support).

My guess: The 3D versions of web 2.0 experiences

I don't think traditional AAA makes sense in the browser right now, but I see all sorts of UGC experiences having large synergy with web standards. The business playbook is largely there too.

One reason the market isn't sufficiently large yet is really because of the creation tools at our disposal imo. Web 2.0 explosion was arguably driven by great network effects of the proliferation of mobile cameras.

Right now, none of my friends make 3D content. I personally believe that's going to change with depth sensors, 3D scanning, nerf, generative content, etc.. so the trendline is there for me to buy this theory. I'd look more towards social games, hangout type experiences, or async consumption... as opposed to realtime, networked, embodied, immersive.

Side-note: Apple has demonstrated the willingness to change their tune on WebGL, I suspect they'll catch up pretty quick.

I think there is a decent sized market in terms of number of players but monetization is not as good as other platforms. There's no IAP and less inventory of app install ads, which I believe are the two big moneymakers for native mobile games.

One successful path seems to be early access on the web to build a following, with a release on Steam/app stores for monetization afterward using Electron or Node, with the web version remaining as a free demo (e.g. Vampire Survivors or CrossCode). The other path is ad monetization, and there are a lot of portals like crazygames.com or poki.com that host that type of game. I think the market there is largely schoolkids with Chromebooks. I'm not aware of any successful web games that are sold as an up front purchase like Steam games.

You can get really close to instant and it’s about how you build and package your content. If you need to download megabytes of assets and/or do complex processing on load you’ll be in for a bad time. The fractured hardware base you deal with by making an educated choice about the minimum spec you will target and accepting that people below that will have a worse experience or be unable to take part.

I'm not the person you are responding to but I've been working on a web 3D rendering focused product for a bit now.

One issue that we've run into is that by default on laptops, Windows will not use an available discrete GPU in the browser. The only way to work around this is if you go to your power settings (not in the browser) and tell Windows to use the discrete GPU over an integrated one.

I wasn't aware of that (though I don't know why I would be). That's very useful to know. Is this by default on battery, or by default full stop?

Our testing showed default full stop.

Are you saying that windows ignores the `powerPreference: "high-performance"` setting of the WebGL context creation?

Yes, we thought that was strange too but it kind of makes sense if the process is unaware that the GPU exists because of the OS settings.

As an aside, we also discovered that `powerPreference` is only a hint according to the spec, so there's no guarantee that an implementation will adhere to it: https://registry.khronos.org/webgl/specs/latest/1.0/

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