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by basseq
970 days ago
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Or perhaps: are there good web games anymore? Whether it's consumer trends or technical accessibility, it seems to be more of a "wasteland" than it was 10 years ago. [Old man shakes fist at clouds.] Meaning more "small and not very good games" or a focus on simpler concepts à la Wordle. Did developers move to mobile? Was there something about Flash that reduced the barrier to entry that we have lost? Did consumer preferences change? Is this all anecdote and the indie game scene is thriving? |
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I believe the web is now Wordle or bust, by which I mean you need a wordle type sharing mechanic or you will not get repeat players. Players of webgames seem overwhelmingly to jump from one to the next, and while it is easier to get that first play session than from mobile app stores it is much harder to get them back. This is not helped by monetization on the web being awful.
An exception to that is the crypto space, which seems to not generate too much money either and suffers from the related phenomenon of players involved mainly to acquire things to express themselves. Some form of UGC seems a necessity moving forward.
Flash represented a very fixed target that was easy for everyone to reason about. (On mobile this is one reason iOS is much easier than Android). Typically the game itself wouldn’t even resize, it was just hosted on a page that did. It got a understandably bad name with tech people but as an art tool with programming embedded it was actually very good, just not a secure delivery platform.
The result is the web has barriers of entry low enough to keep competition insane while being complicated enough to deliver premium experiences on that it is practically impossible. Not a winning situation.