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Play Counter Strike 1.6, with full multiplayer, in the browser

(play-cs.com)
1345 points philosopher1234 | 4 comments | 02 Feb 23 16:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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astlouis44 ◴[02 Feb 23 23:10 UTC] No.34634613[source]▶
For anyone interested in WebAssembly and the future of gaming in the browser - my team and I at Wonder Interactive are bringing the full power of native gaming to the web. We're building out a platform and suite of tools that allows developers to publish, host, share, and monetize their games directly to their players online, without 30% fees.

The current focus is on the Unreal Engine (4.24, 4.27) and UE5 support which is coming later this year. Other engines will follow such as Unity, Godot, Open 3D Engine, and custom engines we can provide porting for on our paid plans. We're building out a WebGPU backend for UE5, to really enable high end desktop and console quality games in HTML5.

Further reading, with demos attached:

https://theimmersiveweb.com/blog

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marginalia_nu ◴[02 Feb 23 23:20 UTC] No.34634729[source]▶
Given the boundary condition that a web browser can certainly not allow a game to make more out of the hardware, that is, the best case is that in-browser gaming is equal to native gaming, and the probable case is that it's somewhat worse; what is the rationale between targeting a browser?
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astlouis44 ◴[02 Feb 23 23:23 UTC] No.34634774[source]▶
Portability and accessibility are the two big ones for players.

When games are a single click away, no dedicated client or launcher download required.... anyone can be a gamer.

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1. encryptluks2 ◴[03 Feb 23 00:20 UTC] No.34635350[source]▶
Have you ran the numbers to see how many game developers would switch to get rid of their launchers that they picked. I'm guessing it is zero.
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2. marginalia_nu ◴[03 Feb 23 00:49 UTC] No.34635622[source]▶
We kinda had that before with Flash I guess, although the tooling was a huge on-ramp for that ecosystem.

I don't see any modern tools that are nearly as accessible.

3. nmilo ◴[03 Feb 23 01:52 UTC] No.34636154[source]▶
How would you even "run the numbers"? How about try the idea and see if it works? All it would take is one hit game for devs to see the potential of web gaming (and they already see it. Why do you think flash games were so popular?) If Fortnite could run in the browser it probably would have instantly become the biggest game in the world.
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4. astlouis44 ◴[03 Feb 23 21:08 UTC] No.34647735[source]▶
Fortnite will absolutely be able to run in the browser, once WebGPU ships.