September 27 2011
Stand-alone games that you install on your PC's hard drive have always had large advantages over their Web-based counterparts when it comes to 3D graphics, sound, and physics. With the advent of HTML 5, those advantages are beginning to diminish, and we will undoubtedly see much more visually spectacular games running in browsers before long.
Current Web Technology
I should point out that high-end graphics are by no means required to create a successful video game. Hits like Minecraft, FarmVille, Peggle, and Runescape are testimony to this. Instead of fancy graphics, they rely largely on gameplay and convenience to draw an audience. These kinds of games are also benefiting from the growth of gaming on mobile devices.
That said, graphics are still important on the PC, especially if you want people to spend $50-60 up front on your game. Part of the appeal of franchises like Call of Duty and Battlefield is seeing what the hardware is capable of, and the history of video gaming is closely tied to these graphical capabilities.
The current generation of browser-based games have a lot in common with the classic PC and console games of the 80s and 90s. Although there are plugins that make 3D graphics possible in a browser, the majority of casual and social games continue to use 2D graphics. The Unity plugin, in particular, has raised the bar for 3D graphics in browser games, but it still has a long way to go before it can offer anything that compares to Crysis.
The Demise of Flash?
Adobe’s Flash products have long served to bring games, animation, audio, and movies to browsers that were never really designed for much more than text and pictures. The Flash plugin is very widespread in the PC world, but there is resistance to it on some mobile platforms, most notably from Apple. Apple has chosen not to support Flash on the iPhone, iPod, or iPad. Since most video on the Web is now available in H.264 format as well as Flash, users of these devices aren't missing much apart from Web games, and there are plenty of alternatives to those on the App Store. If you the details of Apple's reasoning on this, they are posted on the official Apple site in Steve Jobs' own words.
There's no doubt that a great deal of Flash's functionality (and that of other plugins like Quicktime and Silverlight) is undermined by HTML 5, and it's just a matter of time before HTM L5 is supported by all major browsers across almost every platform, including Apple's. It's an open standard that takes a software layer out of the equation and reaches a vast range of devices, which is already making HTML 5 very attractive to developers.
No More Installing?
It could well be that, in the long run, games developed in HTML 5 will have the same level of 3D graphical capabilities and performance that installed games have. Local storage and direct access to the graphics engine have traditionally been the main advantages installed games had over browser games, but HTML 5 overcomes these barriers.
Of course, game assets have grown very large, and installing them from a DVD or a large download isn't really that painful. Having them stream over as you play can be handy, but it isn't always ideal, particularly if you want to play offline. There are also other technologies that will be competing directly with HTML 5 for game dollars, such as cloud-gaming, so it's probably a little early to forecast which approach will prevail. After all, computing can change a lot in the space of five years.
