You must log in or register to comment.
Porting two existing titles is hardly what I would consider a new golden age.
Browser games peaked in the 00s-10s as the most accessible place to publish a simple indie project. It was simple and easy for beginner developers to just make something and put it out there, and for those that took off there was a decent pipeline to monetize a hit by licensing it to sites that would share a cut of ad revenue.
But now, mobile and Steam have replaced that as the go-to target for developers. They’ve gotten to a point where they’re just as accessible to develop for, and if you want to make a living off your work you’ll have a much better shot that way.
Plenty of great tools still exist for HTML5 development, if developers wanted to they could, and some do. Itch.io has a good amount of new browser games, they exist.
But there’s never going to be anything as big as Newgrounds or Kongregate. Those days are gone for good.
Most of crazy games is ad-riddled ports of ad-riddled mobile games with no depth. It’s hard to find good games there.
Will never be anywhere close to what Newgrounds and Kongregate were at their peak.
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.
You can get quite a few options at Itch.io if you filter for games that have an HTML5 version, and click through - much faster than installing options from Steam Next Fest. Unity and other small game engines have been perfect for that.
We need an app for browser games…
It’s called Firefox
What is?
The answer alex, is “What is the name of the app for browser games?”
:P
That’s not an app for browser games, that’s just a browser.
So browser games are games that run in a browser. The browser is the app.
Are you saying you want some silly 3rd party wrapper “application” that simply loads a page in whatever browser without the typical URL controls like so many android and apple “apps” are? because that’s just silly.
If you want to click an icon to open, create a hyperlink shortcut and click that to launch it… you could even create a separate profile that launches JUST for games, so that it doesn’t show up in your normal profile or interact with other cached files or cookies or even have the same addons.
I think they’re referring to the Flash Games Archive or something similar that doesn’t have compatibility with modern browsers. Definitely use an ordinary browser for things like HTML files though.
Yes that’s what I would like to see. No, that’s not silly. It would make it easier to browse the library and launch them without a mouse, which requires a desk.
it doesn’t make any sense to have a centralized distributor acting as a middleman. The current implementation requires bringing your own game files either manually or via a steam connection. There’s only two games, the minecraft clone mentioned is just a web browser game and not actually minecraft.
Since most browser games simply “just work” when you go to the website i’d just create a profile launcher firefox link, and then in that profile build out each game you want as one of your homepage links, which would just be a grid of bookmarks basically. It’s entirely overkill for exactly two games imo, and if you’re on a desktop that can run these games you’re better off running them natively.
If you’re on mobile you’re currently SOL it looks.
dementiaposting
