| Here's some feedback from a game developer working on a game that runs in a browser plugin (not Unity) and also has a standalone client: The 1.5 year notice you gave before depreciating the NPAPI in Chrome was way to short. 5 to 10 years would have been realistic to allow existing games to reach their natural end of life. Both NaCl and HTML5 are not appropriate porting target for an existing, complex PC game that's already running for several years. They are only a realistic target platform for starting new projects. What we do now is simply moving our users out of the browser into the standalone client, thankfully our users don't mind that much since most are 'hardened' PC players that don't mind the scare popup dialogs browsers put up when downloading a native installer. But it can hardly be in the interest of browser vendor to move gamers out of their platform I would think. And for NaCl vs HTML5: - NaCl was never allowed in the wild, only through the Chrome app store - PNaCl simply came too late and had very long compilation times at first start, this has become better but is still a lot slower than FF's asm.js AOT compile pass - performance differences between PNaCl and JS on Chrome are pretty much negligible, especially for a 3D game where WebGL overhead is much more important - emscripten puts much more effort into supporting standard APIs for games then NaCl (e.g. SDL, glfw, OpenAL, ...) - from personal experience, bugs in Chrome on the HTML5/JS side are fixed much more quickly than bugs on the NaCl side, very likely because the HTML5 side has much more resources available From my experience, the PNaCl implementation in Chrome doesn't provide any real-world-advantages over the HTML5 way, and both platforms are a 'hard' porting target. Of all existing platforms (iOS, Android, OSX, game consoles), the web is definitely the hardest to port an existing PC game to (starting from scratch is much easier though). |