I'm really looking forward to seeing more gaming in the browser and hope it catches on. Imagine writing a game and it works on all platforms, PC, Mac, Tablet Android, iOS, etc. Also, TV manufacturers keep putting more powerful chips in their TV's for HD decoding. Couple with this a good browser, could we eventually see an end to console gaming because everyone's TV can play 3D games? Not to mention a lot of the TV's already have network capability. There's plenty of progress to make no doubt but it seems like a serious possibility to me.
This is exactly the reason we started PlayCanvas [http://playcanvas.com]. I don't think it will be long before there is a modern browser in every TV, phone and tablet, in addition to every desktop machine.
I've seen you guys before, I'm gonna have to play around with this sometime. I like how you've decided to also be the publisher/CDN for the games. Right now it seems like everyone who launches some demo has to build and manage their own web presence. Something a native game developer doesn't necessarily have to do. This could help take that extra load off their back. I imagine you'll eventually offer internal APIs of sorts like Steam does, achievements, cloud storage for saved games, etc.
We love how easy it is to get a sample/demo/game published using PlayCanvas, we use it _all_ the time. We offer the option to download your game export and host it yourself but it's one button to publish to PlayCanvas so we're sure most people will want to do that.
I think the big barrier for building a multiplayer RTS in the browser would be the lack of UDP sockets.
You could certainly do something with websockets but it may involve making substantial compromises.
With TVs you have the added issue that people probably don't want to replace their whole TV every couple of years just to upgrade the graphics or whatever.
> I think the big barrier for building a multiplayer RTS in the browser would be the lack of UDP sockets.
This is brought up often but it appears some basic multiplayer is possible over websockets (I've written a very simple game using them). If UDP is that necessary, people will push for it and we'll eventually see it (or something equivalent) in the browser.
> With TVs you have the added issue that people probably don't want to replace their whole TV every couple of years just to upgrade the graphics or whatever.
This is turning out to be less of the case though as older PC hardware can still run newer games. The need for graphics is no longer growing faster than the resources to power them. This is especially noticable in the indie game market where rather simple graphics games have become very popular. Even high-end games don't "need" new power as much as they once did, the PS3 is what, 7 years old now?
I've built a few prototype multiplayer games that use web sockets (Socket.io actually) and the performance has been encouraging. One game I posted on HN had over 30 concurrent users without noticeable lag. It was also terribly inefficient. Each client had 5 msgs/sec outgoing and 150 msgs/sec incoming. The incoming messages could definitely have been optimized.
