Scrolling Game Development Kit Forum

General => Off-Topic => Topic started by: v6v on 2012-03-17, 03:09:01 PM

Title: The End of Desktop Gaming?
Post by: v6v on 2012-03-17, 03:09:01 PM
I may be worrying over nothing, but with all of the game development engines I see converting output to HTML5, and the new WebGL library, I wonder:

Is HTML5 Gaming the effective end of Desktop Gaming (Not for console games, of course. Or..for that mattter, games like Crysis 2. Because there's no way that quality could ever be browser based.)?

In HTML5 Gaming, the user doesn't have to save large files to their disk to play the game.

From what I see, HTML5 is almost capable of replicating anything possible in the desktop without a plugin.

Should anyone making an effort to make a desktop game even put in the effort anymore? Has that decade passed by?

I've been searching for a forum thread about this through Google, but I can't find any.

~#Sharp
Title: Re: The End of Desktop Gaming?
Post by: durnurd on 2012-03-17, 04:42:55 PM
http://www.geekwire.com/2012/mobile-game-developer-html5-future

While the article pertains more to the mobile game realm (my day job), I think it applies to your question too.

As for large files, well... users still need to download the HTML pages, and all the related content, which takes time and disk space in a cache. Or they can save it locally for an increase in speed, but they're still taking up all that disk space.

Another issue is distribution model. HTML 5 is inherently open. If you have a bunch of HTML, JavaScript and images, that's pretty easy to pass around for free. It would be very difficult to monetize that.

Then there's the issue of speed and simplicity.  If you're writing a game in HTML 5, you're writing in JavaScript, a parsed or JIT compiled language at best. The simplicity of writing a game in JavaScript is essentialy useless, as you can get the same simplicity in any sanely-designed language, which can be natively compiled to whatever architecture you're running on, which allows for more FPS, the almighty benchmark.

The one thing HTML 5 supplies is a true write-once-run-anywhere scheme.  But you can get the same benefits once you have a framework written on each platform you plan to develop on.  And in general, C++ is "portable" across platforms anyway.
Title: Re: The End of Desktop Gaming?
Post by: bluemonkmn on 2012-03-17, 08:40:23 PM
I suspect that big commercial game developers will have to rely on cutting edge technologies that HTML5 will be unable to support, as suggested in the article.  But I suspect independent games which can't afford to be quite as cutting edge will start competing with and relying on HTML5 platform developments.  So what happens to games that still try to build on the desktop platform?  Well, if you have a really popular game that happens to rely on a desktop platform, you will just be limiting your audience.  It may become harder to compete with the games that everyone on all platforms can play just because the chatter about those games will be that much louder than the desktop games with the more limited audience.  But that doesn't mean desktop games are necessarily going away.  It will probably be like mobile phones versus land lines.  A long slow transition, with some reasons to maintain both.  But that's just my guess.
Title: Re: The End of Desktop Gaming?
Post by: v6v on 2012-03-17, 09:17:27 PM
I see. An era where they both reside, without being a real threat to each other. Worries gone. Continuing on.

For a moment there I was terrified that I was behind the times.
Title: The End of Desktop Gaming
Post by: AlonzosSa on 2016-02-26, 01:08:18 AM
if your willing to drop that kinda money on alienware just for general gaming you could take that money and get a serious gaming rig going on a custom build.Alot of what a custom build is really just plugging in a bunch of stuff....

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