I can’t wait for webgpu and wasm to be more mature. You’ll be able to truly write a game once and release it literally everywhere. Like what Java was supposed to be. I think it’s going to be a nice little golden age for games and other software. But the last time I checked webgpu wasn’t ready yet.
The overhead is low and modern computers are very fast. The budget will be very healthy indeed.
So the browser might have some unavoidable overhead, but for most games it probably won't even matter, and others using the wgpu API can target native desktop platforms.
A voxel game, Veloren, recently migrated to wgpu and wrote up some of their experiences here:
So the game that runs without problems on your development machine, can have all sorts of issues on the client browser that you cannot work around like on native, because they are caused by how the browser is blacklisting the user's hardware or drivers.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11871077/proper-way-to-d...
Naturally random joe user has no idea what is going on, and will dimiss your game as crap because it is running at e.g. 3 FPS.
Then even if everything is supported in hardware, as OpenGL ES 3.0 subset (defined in 2011), no matter how good the GPU is, there is only so much you can do.
There are browser flags to disable black listing, which is something that regular Joe/Jane has no idea whatsoever that they exist.
Besides, you can head off to webgpu.io and follow up on meeting minutes.
Even better, attend the upcoming WebGL/WebGPU meeting from Khronos (registration currently open) and pose that question if you prefer to hear the same from the browser vendors themselves.
Have a nice joyful day.
Maybe the browser versions won't be too great, but I'm more optimistic about the WebGPU libraries which allow you to target the desktop.