It’s an awful business model. It’s one thing to have Safari hobbled because of high quality business apps and games, another for loot boxes, gems and countdown timers to exploit whales.
The main advantage of the web is interoperability, if you don’t have that and the game engines developers just go for native.
Once the core gaming APIs are supported across both iOS and Android (WebGPU, SIMD, WASM threads, fast storage, install prompts, notifications), I think you will see the main gaming engines implemented and then you’ll see the games move.
The game studios like in app purchasing where you get to buy loot boxes and other zero marginal cost goods without thinking about it.
We have a control in the experiment - we have an “open ecosystem” in Android and supposedly a much better browser - yet and still, game developers still choose to give Google the same 30% cut as Apple. Maybe it’s not because Apple is holding the web back?
I’m not claiming or not claiming that Safari is best at supporting “web standards”. I’m simply saying that if Apple supported every web standard in the world, the revenue generating apps would still be native.