Efficiency vs. Accessibility: John Carmack's take on the potential of web games | Hacker News Reader

Efficiency vs. Accessibility: John Carmack's take on the potential of web games

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15 pointsastlouis443 comments

Now, what kind of user is restricted to a single browser without an exposed or effective runtime to locally execute games? What kind of inferior, second-rate user experience would promote web gaming over the native experience? Which users are the ones insisting upon changing the status-quo when Windows and console releases work so well?

It's a mystery. We may never know why users demand for browser-based titles when WINE and DXVK are locally executable on any sufficiently capable hardware.

Accessibility. Portability. Not everyone is a Windows or Linux gamer. Many are on Mac, which has less than steller support for native games. WebGPU is a cross-platform abstraction for bringing modern compute to the web, which in turn would open up a new distribution channel for games on Mac.

It's very easy to see where this is all headed.

Stadia brought a new cross-platform abstraction for bringing modern compute to the web and Mac. It sucked, had a miserably small library, and now it is another headstone in the Google Graveyard.

Game developers had the last decade to port their game to MacOS. They chose not to, because it's more trouble than it's worth. Even if people do jump onto webdev as a target, you're going to suffer the Stadia problem of only hosting new titles and gachapon games. You need to support a compatibility layer with Windows, otherwise you just straight-up do not get to play most Windows games. Web gaming runtimes are a farce, promoted as a desperate last-ditch effort to get games on a platform that is overtly hostile to them otherwise.

It's silly to me that Apple promotes a simplified image of the web in one hand while promoting unnecessary complexity with the other. You want to play games on MacOS? Fix the damn runtime. Web browsers are a red-herring solution that only diverts attention away from how unbelievably unattractive the Mac's native APIs are.

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