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Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

Given the boundary condition that a web browser can certainly not allow a game to make more out of the hardware, that is, the best case is that in-browser gaming is equal to native gaming, and the probable case is that it's somewhat worse; what is the rationale between targeting a browser?

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Portability and accessibility are the two big ones for players.

When games are a single click away, no dedicated client or launcher download required.... anyone can be a gamer.

Yes, an example is the .io games, which kids love to play, because they just go to the browser and load the page and they are playing with other kids, just like that. No installation, no setup, no network debugging, etc. These are simple games, but more advanced games would also benefit from nearly frictionless entry to the game.

Have you ran the numbers to see how many game developers would switch to get rid of their launchers that they picked. I'm guessing it is zero.

We kinda had that before with Flash I guess, although the tooling was a huge on-ramp for that ecosystem.

I don't see any modern tools that are nearly as accessible.

How would you even "run the numbers"? How about try the idea and see if it works? All it would take is one hit game for devs to see the potential of web gaming (and they already see it. Why do you think flash games were so popular?) If Fortnite could run in the browser it probably would have instantly become the biggest game in the world.

Fortnite will absolutely be able to run in the browser, once WebGPU ships.

Well people have been trying that since Flash but it's just been nothing but frustrating janky games.

15-30 % platform fees?

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