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$99 to make games with no sound, dodgy input, and a tiny fraction of the graphics and CPU power of native code.

In case you've forgotten what native games look like: http://vimeo.com/16945125

EDIT: I wouldn't be critical at all if this wasn't being sold. Since it is, I'm criticizing it as a business proposition, and it's a bad one. When games like Rage HD are being sold for a few bucks, I don't know how one would even make the $99 back on this engine.

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This is comparing apples with oranges. HTML5 games are meant to compete with current flash games, not with native (and far more expensive to create) 3D games like the one in the video. Most of the succesful mobile games are created using a 2d engine. In the future, this could be done using HTML5 and its nice to see that some pioneers in the field already release engines to play around with it.

HTML5 is very much competing with native as well. HTML5 vs. Flash is just games on Kongregate etc, if that's all HTML5 does, if it even does, then its failed as a casual gaming platform.

I see HTML5 as a growing as a competitor to the native platform. When NaCl (NativeClient) is supported by the popular browsers you can shift all the computationally intensive calculations to the native code and have the rendering done in the browser window. Well, but I guess we'll have to wait for hardware acceleration too to be common thing in these browsers. With FF4 disabling something awesome like websockets by default, IMHO we are going backwards.

P.S: Again the future of IE comes into play. Will they support NativeClient or stick to ActiveX stuff.

It's going to come down to the revenue streams and whether or not models emerge that make a single HTML5 version as (potentially) rewarding as multiple native versions.

with NaCl you can just use stuff like Unity3D and runs amazing browsergames without a plugin install. Since it also supports iOS/Android and gaming consoles, there not much speaking for HTML5, apart from that its free.

Chrome is disabling websockets too.

As of the moment of writing, I do not see HTML5 competing with native games. Especially on mobile devices the performance problems are still to big to make it possible to write the same games as you could write natively. Also I was mentioning native 3D games, not native games such as casual/2d. It could quite possibly be that in the future it will be competing with native 3d games, but right now, this is not realistic to claim.

Yes, Flash is the easy target. But it's also a complete non-victory - the prize for "winning" is HTML5 games will co-exist on sites like Kongregate and Armor Games, and maybe one day represent the majority of new titles.

That still leaves games being developed natively for multiple mobile platforms that are bigger markets, more rewarding, and increasingly more important than Flash for casual gaming.

The fight really isn't whether you develop:

Flash + iPhone + Android + WinMo + whatever

vs.

HTML5 + iPhone + Android + WinMo + whatever.

That nullifies the only benefit of HTML5 - not having to do different versions for each platform.

Zynga is worth more than EA now: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-10-26/zynga-tops-elect...

Like it or not, casual games are becoming a much, much bigger market than "hardcore" games.

Bejeweled is one of the most profitable game franchises right now. If I were writing that game from scratch today, I would do it in Flash or HTML5. That gets you every desktop that matters, and the number of mobile devices that support those technologies is still growing.

Yeah the casual game industry is exploding, and my startup's a big part of it!

My argument wasn't that casual games have any problem, but that Flash itself is just one component of an industry that is increasingly focused on mobile.

Let me know when you get Rage running in a browser.

Also let me know when you get Rage running on all platforms with no modification to the code.

Getting games running on all platforms with no modifications is something that I'm working on. I have a 2D cross platform engine, working on 3D, it's totally possible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webgl

http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/examples/geometry_minecraf...

Not there yet, but it's a start.

I wrote a little WebGL last week, and it seemed like a really solid API. Auto-compiled shaders right in the page as scripts, conversion between js arrays and GL buffers is easy, etc. The only major problem in Chrome 9 beta at least is 100% pegged CPU even on a simple scene...

Try starting Chrome with: --enable-accelerated-compositing

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