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Comment by sultezdukes | Hacker News Reader

I'm just not getting it. I understand the whole "let's make JavaScript the assembly language of the web", but "real" games (not 1987ish 2d scrollers) seem to have an uphill battle in the browser. IE probably won't ever implement WebGL, and even if it did, what's the point? I can point and click on Steam and download 20+ gig for some MMO. How's that suppose to work in the browser?

Can we take baby steps, and get really rich, hardware-accelerated UIs (maybe canvas based), WebSockets, a nice debugging experience (source maps), etc... before we're trying to play Crysis 3 in the browser.

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> IE probably won't ever implement WebGL

Au contraire, http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/30/4165204/microsoft-bringing...

You beat me by 30 seconds. Congrats!

The new version of IE supports WebGL: http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/30/4165204/microsoft-bringing...

*I totally nerded out when I found out by the way.

It might not be the best thing for AAA multi gigabyte games like Crysis 3 (yet), but it makes sense for alot of smaller scale projects, especially online games (typically free to play) where the barrier to entry is low.

Longterm in also makes sense to think of games loading on demand while you play vs downloading everything to disk and install it somewhere. It also solves alot of the piracy problems of the industry.

Today there are Game Engines like Unity3D that already offer Native Client deployment and have their own browser plugin for IE or anything unsupported. Add to that a HTML5 deployment option through Emscripten & ASM.js and the games will basically run anywhere, just in edge cases requiring a plugin.

Today's games make you wait while they download 20 gigs of content up front, but there's no good reason for it. It's already been announced that the PS4 will let you start playing games before they've completely downloaded, and Web games will work the same way. You only need the first part of the first level to start playing.

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