web browser gaming and cloud gaming are the future

Vimm's Lair already lets you play games in their website so piracy sites already have that covered.

You know I always wondered, with modern game engines and web tool kits why aren't web browser based games more popular now?
The answer is obviously because of smartphones, but with HMDs/spatial computing becoming a thing web browser based tech should make a comeback.
It would be awesome to see sites like Newgrounds make a big comeback.

If I were in charge of Nintendo I would start a website called nintendoarcade and make it a onestop place where people can play their backlog of classics through the web browser and include stuff like "cloud saves" and multiplayer, but nintendo is regressive and hates things that make sense so they'll never do that.


EDIT:
To give Nintendo a jewy idea, they could have two tiers on the site one free and the other paid, the free account has intermittent advertisements that appear every 10 - 15 minutes.
They would make so much money.

Browser gaming is fine for games that don't need high performance.

@Zarutaku thats in the past but you can google more about webgpu and webassembly they gonna make high performance games possible on the web browser

so this kind of web browser game about tomb raider for example http://xproger.info/projects/OpenLara/ will evolve fast

I think both of them are not the future given wifi services in general are not even remotely decent on a global level, and many people rather own their own hardware to pirate what they want rather than subscribe to another service.

By the way, stay away from subscription stuff as much as you can

@Tokikoo so web browser games is better then since it caches the full game locally so it can be pirated too if it has no strong drm that is

I don't want either.

If I can't save the game and run it locally today and 50 years from now, I want nothing to do with it.

I remember playing browser games through Unity web player back in 2014. Though, majority still were running on AFP at that time. Is this something similar?

When I was a kid, fighting game people where saying the wired controller input in a snes was lagging. Same to other consoles until the wireless controllers in wii generation and they were really lagging.
My current internet provider gives me a marvelous 70ms avg latency to a server in my own country. I don't want to play everything with 140ms of lag for my inputs, ignoring the full time to deliver the screen and audio transferences, and rebuild them at the dumb terminal. Even worse, that will overload internet service providers and they will probably rise their prices.
So Cloud gaming is a big no no.

And I have a few security concerns with browser gaming, like WASM is basically downloading a software, no advantage there. And it adds electron/browser layer further away from the machine.

It is easier for developers, and publishers/sellers but it is bad for all the environment and inefficient.

@Sasori56483 video compression technology continues to improve though heck with ai upscaling then even 360p video streaming for cloud gaming can look good if ai upscaled to 1080p or even 4k like how dlss 4.5 is today and also like i said video codecs are improving too for cutting compressing more filesize aka bitrates so internet bandwidth will not be a problem imo

wasm is built in the browser so you do not need electron for it

@deg sorry to be preach if you already know this:
If you compress the video, then my dummy terminal (probably a smartphone) will take its time putting the video back together. So it is that 140ms + compression time + compressed transfer + rebuild time vs 140 ms + transfer time. Because I am assuming I need to see everything in my screen, there are some tricks, but I can't run from the 140ms delay.
It is the round trip I sending my input package through the web, and they answering it to me what the game did.

There exists a protocol called UDP, very simple I send you a message it runs the web and gets to you. But most UDP transfers send more than once the message, because net congestion, some of those messages get lost, don't necessarily move in the same path, and I don't want to wait at least 140 ms to discover you didn't receive it. So there is a little of jitter in that 140ms, it sometimes will be 145ms for example.

There is the IP protocol, part too, that udp message needs to go to a computer the router who will look the address and forward closer to you. That address can change. Router has a list of messages, from all over the place coming through. If the list will be bigger than its memory when the package arrives it just drops it, and the package stops existing. If the place in the list the message arrived is further back, it gives it a small delay.

Say each message do be reasonably small after compression they still be that small being sent 3 times? Will they be small if by cosmic energies that message addressed To Dey, starts saying To Deg, will Deg bandwith be able to handle wrong traffic from Beg Dey Dag Dog ... aka message storms? And the internet infrastructure for the peak of Christmas holidays? Or when Hurricanes go around and wreck the havoc.

If you make the dummy terminal very smart, and add dlss, and etc, you start moving to a place where I am cloud gaming but could run it in my machine effortless, and now internet 140ms is just an overhead that I never needed. And I might lose some quality too.

I don't need big guns to play Celeste for example, but I may need it, to play GTA 6, Half Life 3, if they ever launch or some Call of Duty: Expendable Abuse aka CoD: EA. So browser gaming could mean sending Celeste as WASM, and Streaming the interface to GTA6.

But it would be a very big differential if the greed game dev said: I can build a game that runs natively to you all. (and he proceeds to just compile the game and sell it like GoG, because that is all he needed to do. And now we have AI Gaming too)

ps: Electron/browser/webview/Edge engine/ whatever will be between the game and the WASMs. And my dumb terminal keeps becoming smarter and smarter.
A message in average jumps through 6 routers before getting to yours. (And yes this has to do with Bacon degrees)
Prices for cloud computation have been rising due to AI, thus that service also rises. Games are very poorly optimized, and nothing I have seem lately deserves the technical requirements.