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Comment by jaegerpicker | Hacker News Reader

And Streaming games does that even better over WebRTC in the browser and we have that today! With a good internet connection (like 5g that is rolling out) the experience is fantastic. I bought my kids iPad Mini's for christmas, they have both 5g and we have 1gb internet at home and GeForce Now and XBox Cloud Gaming have been absolutely great for them. A ps5 controller and the ipad mini can be the best gaming device available today IMO.

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Streaming games is no different from distribution using a large platform/store with accompanying commissions -- you can't do it independently as a small company. Also more demanding towards one's internet connection and has higher running costs, since you have to pay for both traffic and a server side GPU, so not viable for a certain percentage of lower budget/cheaper/free games.

Almost no one can do game development as a small company without a large platform of some kind. The economies of scale are just too much for small indie dev style game studios to overcome. Speaking as someone that was an indie dev and has been around the game industry for 20 years. I highly doubt that is going to change anytime soon. Webassembly certainly won't fix that issue. I'm not sure what that comment has to do with the subject. With Webassembly you won't have to pay for server side gpu but you will have to pay for discovery, hosting/bandwidth, payment, likely some form of advertising, and some level of support. There is no free lunch and large platforms will nearly always win for software distribution.

I'm not denying any of that, and said something similar in another comment. But Minecraft, Escape from Tarkov came into existence without dependence on a store or a platform. Same for Runescape, albeit in a different time. WASM+WebGPU will make an appearance of such things more possible in 2022+. It's just a technical capability. A web implementation (of an online game) could come in addition to the ones available on Steam and Android/Apple, etc.

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