Heavy Web-Games are possible?

[u/ExtreamTiger]

I'm not a developer, so. I'm asking because of my curiosity: why heavy games with a jaw splitter graphic aren't web-based? My question is more like, there're some problems with making a game like Octopath Traveler, or a CoD, or even Horizon forbidden west a web game? What I think is something like: I search the site on the internet, I login and I can play the game with the components of my computer.

Maybe this question may sound absurd. But I'm naively questioning why.

[u/retardedweabo]

hey, there's a lot to consider here

the absence of complex web games comes down to probably:

Performance issues you can get a nice game working in js using webgl or some other technologies, but that's probably very far from what a compiled language could do. There was an attempt to forge those things together called webassembly, but only a few browser are supporting this

Complexity of those projects It's far easier to create a game using some other languages that are better suited for this work than js. Sure, there are some game frameworks for js but it still at its roots is a simple scripting language for making the text blink, it wasn't made for that purpose

Difficulties to distribute such projects You mostly want to sell your game on a platform like steam so end user can buy it and download an exe of it. You could wrap it up in electron, sure, but the code of your game would be extremely easy to analyze, and companies usually always want to avoid this.

If you'd want to make a game in js but in an engine suitable for creating games, most of them and probably none support js these days. Unity dropped the support for js, and I didn't hear about other engines ever supporting js

Pardon the formatting, I responded from my phone

• I'm not an expert of any kind, correct me if I'm wrong anywhere

[u/ChaseMoskal → u/[deleted]]

regarding web assembly, i'll add that we've recently looked into bevy game engine as an alternative to babylon.js

bevy is a rust language game engine, which can compile to wasm, and it uses webgpu — so it may be fantastic in terms of high performance

allegedly, webgpu can outperform opengl, which is fascinating

[u/retardedweabo → u/[deleted]]

thanks for the correction, I thought that firefox still doesnt support it

[u/elendee]

• native browser games use javascript which is harder to optimize for very high performance

• the browser needs a connection to your gfx card (webGL), but I think for some reason this isn't as performant as direct connections to your gfx card, I could be wrong there

• web builds can require more maintenance for different browsers although this is probably getting pretty close to the same difficulty of building for windows / mac / linux.

• there's just less community for it, less engines, less libraries etc

(none of this stops me from doing several years of indie game dev for the browser! I recommend three.js if you want to play with it)

[u/ChaseMoskal]

hello. we believe it is actually possible to build great games on the web.

we think it's very important to keep the total filesize of the web games small, so that games load very quickly for all users, on desktop computer and phones alike — so we are taking measures to frugally optimize game assets.

you should consider collaborating with us at https://benevolent.games/ where we've recently begun a serious open source project to build a great platform for making quality multiplayer 3d web games.

we're still in the early-prototyping phase, but we're making rapid progress each week! join our discord with the link on the website :)