Arguably, the golden age of browser gaming occurred in the 00s mostly revolving around Adobe Flash. This was an era with high creativity and a low barrier of entry, and also decentralized from gate…
Browser games will never come back outside of proof of concept “hacking”. Even the exemplars the article listed, Celeste and Terrarria, are ports.
And a large part of that is because there is no longer a strong need for them. People wanting a quick way to kill time already have their phones in their pocket. Similarly, Steam et al make releasing even games at this scale borderline trivial. And the same tools that are used to make a “browser game” are used to make a “desktop game” and so forth.
It is similar to why we don’t see anywhere near the same amount of game mods we used to and most of the biggies are legacy projects that have been in development since the early 00s or are spiritual successors (think: Skyblivion and the like). The effort to make a TC/browser game is basically the same as making a “real” game… and using the same tools.
And that doesn’t go into The Internet being a very different place. Back in the 00s? Executing random code with a five year old version of flash would just mean you get porn pop-ups and need to reformat. Now? Viruses are specifically designed to encrypt all your personal data for ransomware or to silently wait until the next time you access your bank account and so forth. Let alone just stealing a steam account to buy a bunch of fifa bucks or whatever.
Browser games will never come back outside of proof of concept “hacking”. Even the exemplars the article listed, Celeste and Terrarria, are ports.
And a large part of that is because there is no longer a strong need for them. People wanting a quick way to kill time already have their phones in their pocket. Similarly, Steam et al make releasing even games at this scale borderline trivial. And the same tools that are used to make a “browser game” are used to make a “desktop game” and so forth.
It is similar to why we don’t see anywhere near the same amount of game mods we used to and most of the biggies are legacy projects that have been in development since the early 00s or are spiritual successors (think: Skyblivion and the like). The effort to make a TC/browser game is basically the same as making a “real” game… and using the same tools.
And that doesn’t go into The Internet being a very different place. Back in the 00s? Executing random code with a five year old version of flash would just mean you get porn pop-ups and need to reformat. Now? Viruses are specifically designed to encrypt all your personal data for ransomware or to silently wait until the next time you access your bank account and so forth. Let alone just stealing a steam account to buy a bunch of fifa bucks or whatever.