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by fidotron 551 days ago
> where are all those great WebGL 2.0 games?

That is my point: there isn’t a technological barrier. It is a business one.

If you made Infinity Blade and put it on the web today what would you get in return for your efforts? Complaints about how it runs better on newer devices than some six year old low end Android running Firefox, and people trying to hack it to change the assets and repackage it on crazygames.

You definitely would not recover your dev cost.

1 comments

It is a technology barrier as well, because browsers don't provide the tooling native APIs do.

Starting by providing the mechanisms to actually control the GPU, work around possible driver issues, the lack of debugging tools, no ways to actually fit into the browser sandbox PlayStation 2, XBox 360 and Dreamcast class games, let alone anything more modern.

It is a black box regarding user and developer experience alike.

You just ignore all contradictory evidence because you don’t understand as much as you think, and have just a superficial grasp of what you are looking at, while having a very nostalgic view of the past.

I am not saying you will get dx12 level games in a browser, certainly not on a phone browser, but your concept of what you are looking at and the real limitations are completely off.

To be honest you come off as stunningly offensive in the process on this subject, but I know you enough from other areas to know you are far from stupid.

The web environment today is nothing like as hard to work with as the Android NDK was in the early years. Source: I led the tech side at EA doing this, among other things.

My phones do Vulkan and Metal level graphics, which is about the same thing as DX 12, naturally not at RTX level.

When will EA prove folks like myself wrong?

They never will because in your head some game you saw on the PS2 was better.
It is not on my head, it is what I can see on browsers today across desktop and mobile devices, outside streaming native rendering, or ShaderToy demos.

The PS2 remark could as well be Flash 3D games, given what is available.