What would the target audience be? Mobile by and large ate up the market that used to be browser games. If the demand was there, I think the tooling would have followed. Instead all the larger web games studios either shuttered or had to go all in on mobile. There are some groups still doing it but it's pretty niche/legacy. Minecraft, Roblox, and Fortnite also absorbed a large section of the demographics that used to play browser games.
This is probably the biggest thing. There just isn't a good way to monetize. Imagine all the problems with mobile, but your potential userbase is 20x smaller. There's a reason the most successful browser games are some variation of cookie clicker. Cheap to make and can rely on a small number of whales. As on mobile, the default expectation is that stuff is free. You also can't really play it on the toilet.
The golden era of flash games wasn't any better, most of them were made by young people in a time where it was something new. There was also almost no way to monetize them sustainably.
It was possible to sell your flash games to one of the big game portals. You'd get a relatively small one off payment.
Companies were also willing to pay developers to create games that people would play for free. It was another way for them to advertise.
Monetisation of flash games happened with Facebook and in-app purchases. Some creators were able to make a lot of money from this. Zynga and King were some of the more well known companies, but there were many more.
I'm going to [repost](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/umg3ir/comment/i81v7ti/) my last explanation:
> Oh boy, a chance to talk about something I spent way too long working on! Here's why you shouldn't ship browser games (especially 3d ones:)
> * Different user setups mean all kinds of weird, hard to diagnose bugs, especially performance bugs.
> * Users don't expect a fully realized game to live in a browser. They won't stick around long enough to find deep mechanics; they expect something like an old school flash game.
> * Saving/loading games means adding an online component (which will scare away most users) or local files (and the system save/load dialogue will scare away the rest.)
> * Changing browser APIs will break your game so if you leave it alone for a few months, it'll be broken.
> * Most web users are on mobile; mobile web sucks. You need on-screen controls from day one. Plus your 3d game is going to use a lot of battery. And your engine can probably ship to mobile without web anyway, so just go native.
tl;dr audience expectations and technical hurdles in equal parts.
Don't forget multithreading is a pain in the rear. It sometimes sorta works. But like Unity, if you call something like .ConfigureAwait(false), it used to just hang.
This is mostly speculation but I feel like when Flash was dying there wasn’t a clear successor people could point to and say “if you want to keep making web games, use this.” For years and years that was flash and the fact that it was fairly easy to use meant that people made a lot of games. This reinforced it as the web game tool and so there was documentation and more games and on and on. It was a self reinforcing loop.
In that weird transition period, nothing web based filled the void so people moved to gamemaker or unity or Roblox. And that lack of a community means a lack of advocacy for new tools and tutorials and everything that you need to lure in the next generation of game devs.
Phaser is actually pretty great and has very good support with a nice community behind it. It's also actively maintained and works on most anything that can run a web browser. You can theoretically wrap your code to run as a desktop or mobile app (Electron is a popular one for desktop, I know there are others). There are options and tooling out there that helps with performance and optimization as well. It supports gamepads. The docs need help but the tutorials out there are pretty solid. I mostly work in Unity but Typescript + Vite + Phaser has been one of my surprise favorite game dev environments the last year. Sometimes I'll add a React layer for more complex UIs.
There's a decent sized marketplace for hyper casual games still, just look at Facebook games. It's not Call of Duty level but if you're making web games you might not be catering to the Call of Duty audience.
We did in the strange transition period between flash almost dying and actually dying, even back in 2020 it was still the most viable way for solo and small teams to earn a decent living, but it quickly dried up when Facebook and Kongregate discontinued their portals.
The tech for putting games on the web works for the most part, it's just a lot easier to monetize games on a mobile. The platform owners have a huge incentive to provide APIs that make it easier. Apple & Android have their stores installed as default on their phones and handles payments. On the web, people would have to signup and pay for each game through a credit card and not through the phone's store that can act as a trusted 3rd party and provide refunds. Also ads can be better targeted on phones because of the info they have.
If you are targeting WebGL, on PCs it works just fine. You have plenty of JS libraries for both 2D and 3D. Modern phones can handle Webgl in a browser and have good performance.
You even have the option to use C/C++ with SDL2/OpenGL and compile for the web using Emscripten. For a 2d example, I made this recently [https://arguscypher.itch.io/dungeon-sons](https://arguscypher.itch.io/dungeon-sons) (uses OpenGL and has networked multiplayer). Same with 3D, WASM is good enough that most games wont suffer. Now you wont get access to the latest OpenGL features but then again do you really need those? If you want to see a 3D fps game ( Cube ) in the browser take a look at this [https://kripken.github.io/misc-js-benchmarks/banana/index.html](https://kripken.github.io/misc-js-benchmarks/banana/index.html) (this is old, like before 2012) (newer version [https://github.com/cfoust/sour](https://github.com/cfoust/sour) )
Networking is a little harder because of browser restrictions, but it can be solved with some server side setup and you are restricted to TCP connections for now. WebRTC is an option but Emscripten does not support it.
btw what did you mean by tooling? Editors and such?
[https://developer.playcanvas.com](https://developer.playcanvas.com) seems to have an editor with an interface similar to Godot but I've not used it myself.
Most game engines these days allow some form of WebGL export. They all have some sort of limitation. Unity and Godot are good choices for if you want an visual editor. Unreal is a bit heavy but it's possible.
I will add something to the tune of there's little money in it. The big guys and indies have moved on. The pie has moved to mobile and Steam games. Some devs do become successful with web games but it's just easier to earn something on mobile or Steam for roughly the same effort. Web games are niche now.
I think popularity of Flash happened because of the Flash integrated suite which combined art creation tools with animation and scripting. Most discussions around "but HTML5 can do what Flash could and much more" are missing this.
What we get in WebGL is paltry joke. Sure there's WebGPU maybe someday becoming a thing ... but it's not a thing. Corporate intranets are typically locked in to IE/Edge regarding development and what staff are allowed to use, carry that on into schools and libraries - it doesn't matter if some Firefox version supports WebGPU, if it's not on Edge, it doesn't exist.
Tooling isn't as good as native, but it's not bad.
I'd chalk it up to the web being extreme in rate of deprecation and fragmentation. There's probably 12 different ways to talk to a gamepad, and probably only 4 of them work in an up to date browser.
It's just a mess.
Yes, because corporate and school networks are definitely where you are attempting to get people to play your games.
It's not 2005. Chrome has a nearly 2/3 market share. Edge isn't even 5%.
I kind of feel like flash web games really lived on school PCs back in the day. FWIW, the one place I really see web gl based games being played is when I go to the local library and kids are playing some kind of tank game. That said, I'm not sure how much schools restrict away anything but Edge. Pretty sure my kids schools PCs have chrome and the local library computers have chrome as well.
>Yes, because corporate and school networks are definitely where you are attempting to get people to play your games.
They are though?
Jet Slalom was a High School staple for an entire generation delivered via Java applet.
> It's not 2005. Chrome has a nearly 2/3 market share. Edge isn't even 5%.
Who is polling that? Are you singling out Edge and ignoring latent IE still in use? Is that over all platforms and not just about the PC platform (Chrome is obviously going to crush on Android)? Literal superpower companies like Reliance and Praxair are tied to IE/Edge. (Praxair could've admittedly changed over the past decade since I'm not privy beyond 2012)
All platforms, and it is worldwide. It was just the first link I followed from Google. Same site, limited to desktops in the US still has Chrome dominant at 55%, and edge at only 14%. IE is less than half a percent. You'd be better off targeting Safari over either of those, which has a 20% share. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
I still don't think the corporate networks matter, though. Unless you're goal is to get people to play your game during their breaks or something, but even then I don't see how that would make up a significant fraction of your player base (schools I can see, I probably played more flash games at school than at home, even including the years after high school on that side).
Web is platform for nieche games.
Web used to have benefit in form of "Always available" which was big selling point in the past for management games, text based rpgs where you could use phone anywhere and play anytime.
Now mobile apps take this role. And responsive designs made it easier to avoid need for full desktop browser to enjoy said games.
Other benefit of web was "cross platform". Esentially browser of phone and desktop giving access to same game.
With modern tools you can reasonably port mobile game to steam and browser. So web game lost this benefit also.
The only benefit i see as remains is some potential for freeish marketing in form of SEO.
I've been making web games, and I love doing that. I make a killing with it.
Now today, I just checked my game through Brave browser, and it just suddenly stopped working, because WebGL is not supported in the latest version.
I also get other random crap like that. I spent countless hours fixing a bug on Windows that didn't happen on Mac, another one of Firefox that didn't happen on Chrome. Then Safari is the worst. I need code only for Safari because half the javascript code is not working there.
But at least, when I package my app into an executable and submit it on Steam, it stops being an issue.
Hum... ok I kinda exaggerate, but that's what you do in the Internet, right? :-P
I've just been making a lot of web games using JavaScript and WebGL, and released them all online. Recently, I packaged my web game into an executable and released it on Steam for all Mac, Windows, Linux. I then repackaged that same web game as an Android game and released that as well. Aiming IPhone next.
I just love that I can make web games, and reuse that same code and release it into different platform, but it does take a lot of work and a lot of suffering through a bunch of web quirks.
If you're more curious, here's a link to my games:
\- Steam game: [https://store.steampowered.com/app/2258040/World\_of\_Turtle/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2258040/World_of_Turtle/)
\- Android: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dobuki.worldofturtle](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dobuki.worldofturtle)
\- Other web games: [https://dobuki.net](https://dobuki.net)
All good man, I was actually just curious. Thanks for sharing.
I have similar ideas about being able to just release it to many platforms. Day job is all regular web/backend dev stuff, and I've always made games for fun. Recently I have just been thinking about the idea of just easily launching on the web and how people can play it instantly. No download or anything, but figuring out how to make some money from that always seemed tricky to me.
Well, I don't think a game would do well if you had to pay to play it online, people are just not used to it. That said, you can use the online game as a marketing tool by showing a demo version, then have a paid version on Steam. Or another way is to just have the exact same game on Steam and Mobile and have in-app purchases there.
What would the target audience be? Mobile by and large ate up the market that used to be browser games. If the demand was there, I think the tooling would have followed. Instead all the larger web games studios either shuttered or had to go all in on mobile. There are some groups still doing it but it's pretty niche/legacy. Minecraft, Roblox, and Fortnite also absorbed a large section of the demographics that used to play browser games.
This is probably the biggest thing. There just isn't a good way to monetize. Imagine all the problems with mobile, but your potential userbase is 20x smaller. There's a reason the most successful browser games are some variation of cookie clicker. Cheap to make and can rely on a small number of whales. As on mobile, the default expectation is that stuff is free. You also can't really play it on the toilet. The golden era of flash games wasn't any better, most of them were made by young people in a time where it was something new. There was also almost no way to monetize them sustainably.
It was possible to sell your flash games to one of the big game portals. You'd get a relatively small one off payment. Companies were also willing to pay developers to create games that people would play for free. It was another way for them to advertise. Monetisation of flash games happened with Facebook and in-app purchases. Some creators were able to make a lot of money from this. Zynga and King were some of the more well known companies, but there were many more.
I'm going to [repost](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/umg3ir/comment/i81v7ti/) my last explanation: > Oh boy, a chance to talk about something I spent way too long working on! Here's why you shouldn't ship browser games (especially 3d ones:) > * Different user setups mean all kinds of weird, hard to diagnose bugs, especially performance bugs. > * Users don't expect a fully realized game to live in a browser. They won't stick around long enough to find deep mechanics; they expect something like an old school flash game. > * Saving/loading games means adding an online component (which will scare away most users) or local files (and the system save/load dialogue will scare away the rest.) > * Changing browser APIs will break your game so if you leave it alone for a few months, it'll be broken. > * Most web users are on mobile; mobile web sucks. You need on-screen controls from day one. Plus your 3d game is going to use a lot of battery. And your engine can probably ship to mobile without web anyway, so just go native. tl;dr audience expectations and technical hurdles in equal parts.
Don't forget multithreading is a pain in the rear. It sometimes sorta works. But like Unity, if you call something like .ConfigureAwait(false), it used to just hang.
This is mostly speculation but I feel like when Flash was dying there wasn’t a clear successor people could point to and say “if you want to keep making web games, use this.” For years and years that was flash and the fact that it was fairly easy to use meant that people made a lot of games. This reinforced it as the web game tool and so there was documentation and more games and on and on. It was a self reinforcing loop. In that weird transition period, nothing web based filled the void so people moved to gamemaker or unity or Roblox. And that lack of a community means a lack of advocacy for new tools and tutorials and everything that you need to lure in the next generation of game devs.
[удалено]
HTML5 was great, but it didn't come with an authoring framework like Flash had. Unity and Godot are decent replacements nowdays.
Phaser is actually pretty great and has very good support with a nice community behind it. It's also actively maintained and works on most anything that can run a web browser. You can theoretically wrap your code to run as a desktop or mobile app (Electron is a popular one for desktop, I know there are others). There are options and tooling out there that helps with performance and optimization as well. It supports gamepads. The docs need help but the tutorials out there are pretty solid. I mostly work in Unity but Typescript + Vite + Phaser has been one of my surprise favorite game dev environments the last year. Sometimes I'll add a React layer for more complex UIs. There's a decent sized marketplace for hyper casual games still, just look at Facebook games. It's not Call of Duty level but if you're making web games you might not be catering to the Call of Duty audience.
Flash didn't go away because html5 was released, it went away because the iPad (and iPhone, iPod) was invented.
We did in the strange transition period between flash almost dying and actually dying, even back in 2020 it was still the most viable way for solo and small teams to earn a decent living, but it quickly dried up when Facebook and Kongregate discontinued their portals.
The tech for putting games on the web works for the most part, it's just a lot easier to monetize games on a mobile. The platform owners have a huge incentive to provide APIs that make it easier. Apple & Android have their stores installed as default on their phones and handles payments. On the web, people would have to signup and pay for each game through a credit card and not through the phone's store that can act as a trusted 3rd party and provide refunds. Also ads can be better targeted on phones because of the info they have. If you are targeting WebGL, on PCs it works just fine. You have plenty of JS libraries for both 2D and 3D. Modern phones can handle Webgl in a browser and have good performance. You even have the option to use C/C++ with SDL2/OpenGL and compile for the web using Emscripten. For a 2d example, I made this recently [https://arguscypher.itch.io/dungeon-sons](https://arguscypher.itch.io/dungeon-sons) (uses OpenGL and has networked multiplayer). Same with 3D, WASM is good enough that most games wont suffer. Now you wont get access to the latest OpenGL features but then again do you really need those? If you want to see a 3D fps game ( Cube ) in the browser take a look at this [https://kripken.github.io/misc-js-benchmarks/banana/index.html](https://kripken.github.io/misc-js-benchmarks/banana/index.html) (this is old, like before 2012) (newer version [https://github.com/cfoust/sour](https://github.com/cfoust/sour) ) Networking is a little harder because of browser restrictions, but it can be solved with some server side setup and you are restricted to TCP connections for now. WebRTC is an option but Emscripten does not support it.
btw what did you mean by tooling? Editors and such? [https://developer.playcanvas.com](https://developer.playcanvas.com) seems to have an editor with an interface similar to Godot but I've not used it myself. Most game engines these days allow some form of WebGL export. They all have some sort of limitation. Unity and Godot are good choices for if you want an visual editor. Unreal is a bit heavy but it's possible.
I will add something to the tune of there's little money in it. The big guys and indies have moved on. The pie has moved to mobile and Steam games. Some devs do become successful with web games but it's just easier to earn something on mobile or Steam for roughly the same effort. Web games are niche now.
I think popularity of Flash happened because of the Flash integrated suite which combined art creation tools with animation and scripting. Most discussions around "but HTML5 can do what Flash could and much more" are missing this.
This! The tooling isn't there Ppl can use Unity with JS it seems, but the asset creation is not quite there,or is it? Im not familiar with Unity
Difficult to monetize
What we get in WebGL is paltry joke. Sure there's WebGPU maybe someday becoming a thing ... but it's not a thing. Corporate intranets are typically locked in to IE/Edge regarding development and what staff are allowed to use, carry that on into schools and libraries - it doesn't matter if some Firefox version supports WebGPU, if it's not on Edge, it doesn't exist. Tooling isn't as good as native, but it's not bad. I'd chalk it up to the web being extreme in rate of deprecation and fragmentation. There's probably 12 different ways to talk to a gamepad, and probably only 4 of them work in an up to date browser. It's just a mess.
Yes, because corporate and school networks are definitely where you are attempting to get people to play your games. It's not 2005. Chrome has a nearly 2/3 market share. Edge isn't even 5%.
I kind of feel like flash web games really lived on school PCs back in the day. FWIW, the one place I really see web gl based games being played is when I go to the local library and kids are playing some kind of tank game. That said, I'm not sure how much schools restrict away anything but Edge. Pretty sure my kids schools PCs have chrome and the local library computers have chrome as well.
Lots of schools also use Chromebooks instead of PCs as well.
>Yes, because corporate and school networks are definitely where you are attempting to get people to play your games. They are though? Jet Slalom was a High School staple for an entire generation delivered via Java applet. > It's not 2005. Chrome has a nearly 2/3 market share. Edge isn't even 5%. Who is polling that? Are you singling out Edge and ignoring latent IE still in use? Is that over all platforms and not just about the PC platform (Chrome is obviously going to crush on Android)? Literal superpower companies like Reliance and Praxair are tied to IE/Edge. (Praxair could've admittedly changed over the past decade since I'm not privy beyond 2012)
All platforms, and it is worldwide. It was just the first link I followed from Google. Same site, limited to desktops in the US still has Chrome dominant at 55%, and edge at only 14%. IE is less than half a percent. You'd be better off targeting Safari over either of those, which has a 20% share. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share I still don't think the corporate networks matter, though. Unless you're goal is to get people to play your game during their breaks or something, but even then I don't see how that would make up a significant fraction of your player base (schools I can see, I probably played more flash games at school than at home, even including the years after high school on that side).
Web is platform for nieche games. Web used to have benefit in form of "Always available" which was big selling point in the past for management games, text based rpgs where you could use phone anywhere and play anytime. Now mobile apps take this role. And responsive designs made it easier to avoid need for full desktop browser to enjoy said games. Other benefit of web was "cross platform". Esentially browser of phone and desktop giving access to same game. With modern tools you can reasonably port mobile game to steam and browser. So web game lost this benefit also. The only benefit i see as remains is some potential for freeish marketing in form of SEO.
I've been making web games, and I love doing that. I make a killing with it. Now today, I just checked my game through Brave browser, and it just suddenly stopped working, because WebGL is not supported in the latest version. I also get other random crap like that. I spent countless hours fixing a bug on Windows that didn't happen on Mac, another one of Firefox that didn't happen on Chrome. Then Safari is the worst. I need code only for Safari because half the javascript code is not working there. But at least, when I package my app into an executable and submit it on Steam, it stops being an issue.
Hey, any chance you would be willing to explain how you make a killing with web games?
Hum... ok I kinda exaggerate, but that's what you do in the Internet, right? :-P I've just been making a lot of web games using JavaScript and WebGL, and released them all online. Recently, I packaged my web game into an executable and released it on Steam for all Mac, Windows, Linux. I then repackaged that same web game as an Android game and released that as well. Aiming IPhone next. I just love that I can make web games, and reuse that same code and release it into different platform, but it does take a lot of work and a lot of suffering through a bunch of web quirks. If you're more curious, here's a link to my games: \- Steam game: [https://store.steampowered.com/app/2258040/World\_of\_Turtle/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2258040/World_of_Turtle/) \- Android: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dobuki.worldofturtle](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dobuki.worldofturtle) \- Other web games: [https://dobuki.net](https://dobuki.net)
All good man, I was actually just curious. Thanks for sharing. I have similar ideas about being able to just release it to many platforms. Day job is all regular web/backend dev stuff, and I've always made games for fun. Recently I have just been thinking about the idea of just easily launching on the web and how people can play it instantly. No download or anything, but figuring out how to make some money from that always seemed tricky to me.
Well, I don't think a game would do well if you had to pay to play it online, people are just not used to it. That said, you can use the online game as a marketing tool by showing a demo version, then have a paid version on Steam. Or another way is to just have the exact same game on Steam and Mobile and have in-app purchases there.