whew game engine running on WASM + WebGPU would finally be what it takes to power browser based AAA titles. We shouldn't have to download executables via garden walled ecosystems that take a huge chunk of devs revenues
WebGPU is pretty far behind what AAA games are using even as of 6 years ago. There's extra overhead and security in the WebGPU spec that AAA games do not want. Browsers do not lend themselves to downloading 300gb of assets.
Additionally, indie devs aren't using Steam for the technical capabilities. It's purely about marketshare. Video games are a highly saturated market. The users are all on Steam, getting their recommendations from Steam, and buying games in Steam sales. Hence all the indie developers publish to Steam. I don't see a web browser being appealing as a platform, because there's no way for developers to advertise to users.
That's also only indie games. AAA games use their own launchers, because they don't _need_ the discoverability from being on Steam. So they don't, and avoid the fees. If anything users _want_ the Steam monopoly, because they like the platform, and hate the walled garden launchers from AAA companies.
EDIT: As a concrete example of the type of problem's WASM for games face, see this issue we discovered (can't unload memory after you've loaded it, meaning you can never save memory by dropping the asset data after uploading assets to the GPU, unless you load your assets in a very specific, otherwise suboptimal sequence): https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/12057#issuecomment...
(I work on high end rendering features for the Bevy game engine https://bevyengine.org, and have extensive experience with WebGPU)
I agree that the feature set around WebGPU is constrained and becoming outdated tech compared to native platforms. It shouldn't have taken this long just to get compute shaders into a browser, but here we are. The lack of programmable mesh pipelines is a barrier for a lot of games, and I know that's just the beginning.
For memory, architecturally, that's why I'm treating wander as a tree of nodes, each containing Wasm functions - everything gets its own stack, and there is a strategy to manage Store sizes in wasmtime. Deleting that is the only way to free memory vs a singular application compiled to Wasm with one stack/heap/etc. More of a data-driven visualization framework than a full engine like Bevy, which I still think is one of the most elegant ways to build browser based games and 3d environments.
https://github.com/9ballsyndrome/WebGL_Compute_shader/issues...
https://www.khronos.org/webgl/public-mailing-list/public_web...
AFAICT (I was peripherally involved with one of the companies that did this work), this really went nowhere, even though it offered "play this new game from any java-equipped browser".
WebGL and WebGPU are mostly fine for visualization and ecommerce, and that is about it.
Ah, and shadertoy like demos as well, probably their biggest use case.
Which is how Steam charges 30%. Devs yell at Apple because they can say Apple is overcharging because of its "monopoly", they can't blame the monopoly on Steam.
With Steam, devs recognize that retailers get paid for shelf space, both as a percentage of 'retail price' the buyer pays above wholesale, and as literal payments for shelf space, inclusion in weekly mailings, posters on the windows, and more.
That these models worked like this long before digital distribution, and still work like this on platforms with no technical barrier to creating competing stores, gets ignored.
There are many reasons to complain, but 30% surely isn't it, as much as they make it to be.
It's Not The 30% Fee That Makes People Angry, Rather The Lack Of Competing Alternatives Holding Said Fee Accountable
But that's the core the issue. In one case (steam) the developers pay 30% because they estimate the services they are getting from steam are worth it, in apple case the devs. pay because they have to.
The problem is not with the business model or the % cut apple takes, the problem is that the business relies on monopolistic behavior. The solution would be simple, decouple IOS the platform from the app store the service. If the apple store is really worth a 30% cut the market would re converge to that price.
> With Steam, devs recognize that retailers get paid for shelf space, both as a percentage of 'retail price' the buyer pays above wholesale, and as literal payments for shelf space, inclusion in weekly mailings, posters on the windows, and more.
> That these models worked like this long before digital distribution, and still work like this on platforms with no technical barrier to creating competing stores, gets ignored.
I would argue that digital distribution and platform are fundamentally different to brick and mortal retailers.
For one, the marginal cost of an app on the store vs space on the shelves is different. My understanding was that what actually drives the cost of shelve space is competition between product manufacturer and the price setting is closer to an auction as opposed to a set price. Nobody would have an issue if all apple was doing was selling promotion/ads spot on the app store.
Also apple shares on digital distribution is much larger than any single retails chain in the US. Thus giving them extreme pricing power.
AFAIK https://wgpu.rs/ makes this possible with Rust.
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But this is very different than what was demonstrated in the vimeo video.
As someone who's been using the Rend3/WGPU/Vulkan stack for over three years, I'd like to see some of these renderer projects ship something close to a finished product. We have too many half-finished back ends. I encourage people who want to write engines to get behind one of the existing projects and push.
Which is quite different than a renderer that targets wasm/webgpu. I think super highly of, and have used wgpu a fair amount.
I just interpreted Renderlet to have different goals.
On the "backend", we will switch fully to wgpu as we retool around wasi-webgpu. I explicitly don't want to rebuild a project like wgpu, and everybody should commit upstream to that - we will likely have stuff to upstream as well.
The problem isn't the tech to run the game, it's the marketplace - how do you actually sell the games without losing the huge customer base that buys through Steam and platform-specific stores? If you're popular enough you probably still get a lot of customers, but I doubt it's anywhere near what Steam does for you.
Oh, piracy and anti-cheat are also a problem, because you just can't have a AAA game without Denuvo and Kernel Backdoors anymore (greeting to the Apex Legends players out there!).
There are probably still a few issues that would have to be solved on the game engine side, but I'm willing to say that the game engine is not the problem with browser-based games.
I already see web even taking over in things like embedded UIs where native toolkits like QT historically were popular.