Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by fidotron 975 days ago
I spent many years in mobile and then recently decided to try the web stuff.

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.