This short essay (not written for anywhere else) is based on a discussion I had with a friend a while back regarding browser-based gaming and the degradation (just a less ambivalent word for "change") of quality of experience that generally brings along.
I don't want to discuss augmented reality and hardware-specific technological advances in the gaming industry. The title of this thread does not question whether or imply that we'll be running 80-core CPUs or punching out 900 terapixels of fillrate in 50 years. Instead, more provocatively, I would like to address a recent trend and get your input on where this trend is leading us in the near and slightly more distant future. And whether that is a good, a bad or simply an inevitable thing.

With the conception of social networks, distributed cloud gaming saw a real chance to make its debut on the world stage. It changed the entire marketing scheme in gaming and literally broadened the demographic to whom games are offered from mostly young people to just about everyone. Most people who are signed up on Facebook, have likely at least tried out one game or another, or are at least aware of some of the top runners, such as FarmVille. This was most definitely not the case for shelf-distributed titles less than a decade ago. It still isn't and most likely never will be. It's as if gaming has branched into the traditional (not necessarily physically) packaged titles (which have gained some new outlets, but haven't really changed that drastically in nature - underneath the hundred-million-dollar production costs still lie the same principles: maximize hardware use, maximize framerate, create an impression and a world and a story that are immersive to the player, etc.) and productions that are little more than slices of bread to be enjoyed briefly with stale butter like a quickie in an aircraft loo. Very few of the objectives and requirements for non-browser based games are true for non-realtime browser-based games that have made a rather remarkable attack on the industry.

The other facet of the argument is the porting of existing technology (and hopefully) content to a readily accessible cross-platform hardware-oblivious format, which Flash, WebGL and HTML5 are trying to do. It's been possible to play Quake in your browser for what, a year or two now? If Quake is possible then, save for bandwidth limitations, I don't really see a reason why Half-Life or Unreal wouldn't be. Today, that is. But what about World Of Warcraft? What about moving the entire non-nextgen (or why not next gen?) experience to a single container - the browser?

For now, Flash games are like digital video in the '90s - any indie developer can develop and successfully market a Flash game. Anyone can. Although few do as it's actually much harder than it seems. By drawing further parallels with digital video, one can predict that in about a decade we'll most likely be out of the initial dark ages of low quality poorly standardized and limited support limbo things are in for now and we'll likely have a much more comprehensive framework, most likely pioneered by a company like Apple or Google, that will provide container-like emulation for non-bytecode and non-scripted 3D applications. The only major obstacle even today is security, the next it is probably bandwidth. Until that does or doesn't happen, though, we'll be stuck with a much more limited set of tools named above. There will probably be new tools and new standards developed in the relatively near future, but ultimately these will never live up to fully optimized application programmed on a low level. We will get our HD equivalent of browser-based gaming, but it'll still be a step shy of real filmstock.

Until things get better and more standardized, though, we'll be stuck with a continuing flux of indie titles that, while often creative and needed in their own right, will still pollute the industry to a large extent. The indie filmscape is just as uneven, but if you have zero budget, you better have one hell of an idea or story to tell. Sadly, most indie developers don't have that ace up their sleeve (that isn't to say that studio-based projects don't have bad ideas (or have ideas, for that matter); however, production quality by itself can make up for a lot - just look at vanilla Wow, which made you grind for hours and days - and months - with little real benefit). So, ultimately - for now - we're living in a creative vacuum where most of the industry (the less influential, but more volumous part) are migrating to browser-based solutions (and thus inadvertently forming user expectations, which in turn drive the entire industry, thus creating a closed loop). Drawing one last parallel with the film industry - when HD was launched about a decade ago, speculation went that it would soon supercede film and literally dominate the entire craft in just a few short years and companies like Kodak can simply pack their bags and retire. That didn't happen. Hasn't, that is. The truth is, though, that it probably never will. The digital revolution, as grand and as groundbreaking as it has been, changed the world for small time folks, but not necessarily the industry on the whole. The difference of $20000 in production costs for filmstock and processing on a $100M film doesn't even qualify as pocket change.



While I'm arguing that the browser-oriented fad has lessened the immersive (and overall) quality of games and even more importantly created a much more segmented experience (which is bad IMO), it's still building up to be a very strong driving force behind the industry in the near future. The question is, will this go on the way it has? What will things be like in 10 years? What about 20 or 50 years? Will we have major tiles produced direct for the browser? When will the day come that we can just boot up the OS, which literally is the the browser, click on a Play button and the game simply launches? Or will this current fad lead to something entirely different?

You opinions, please! Speculate.

I think one interesting things in all entertainment media right now is that the disparity between professional quality equipment and what is available to the amateur user is shrinking every day; at least in regards to what an average person will notice. You can get a camcorder that records at the same resolution as a blu-ray for under $500, and you can develop 3D games with professional tools for free. On top of that we are in a very interesting time where publishing across all mediums is very simple as well.

This is something that hasn't really been seen before outside of maybe literature. The reason you didn't get as much crap before is because there was far more investment needed to get off the ground, so the odds of making your money back on ok ideas was small. Now there are so many good ways to keep your investment small, so you're seeing trashier ideas as the risk is ignorable. This has affected all media, not just games. How many videos, songs, and written pieces have you read online that are just terrible? Probably a lot. It's the publishing model that sees so much crap released, not standardizing any other part of development.

Indeed; however my argument and question at its core was - will this new medium/publishing model draw in the big fish who would take it to literally new levels by merging the capablities of a technologically inferior environment with a good idea and an increasingly larger budget and production value (try imagining a $150M game explicitly for your browser)? Consider Michael Mann, who shot the film Heat in 1995. he shot it on filmstock like anyone back then. However, starting with Collateral, he's been doing HD projects and he uses the new medium far more boldly and less traditionally than anyone else (apart from, maybe, the Dogme movement - Lars von Trier, Vintenberg et al - who did the same in DV, but with a far inferior budget and while paying heed to a an entirely different dogma). Mann is a big shot name using big ass budgets in a low-cost, far inferior, medium (and he does it professionally from project to project, not casually like for instance Soederbergh who enjoys shooting a million-dollar flick in DV every now and then). What he does is equivalent to someone making an AAA title in Flash and then upscaling it to a Civ5 type publishing environment (it's been done with some RPG's like Machinarium, but not on a truly large scale - most probably mainly due to technological limitations, which I outlined in the OP). Note that I'm not debating whether what Mann makes these days is good, bad or even worse or better than his previous stuff - that's largely irrelevant; the main idea is that he's doing it and he's actually opening a very new avenue for filmmakers working directly out of Hollywood, not just the indie scene.

Apart from the fact that one is thus far free and the other one is not, also try thinking of it this way: production-wise, what is the principal difference between making a high quality video (not just resolution wise) for Youtube and then distributing it in theaters, and taking a film made for theaters and uploading it to Youtube? That is to say, would it not be far easier to have Youtube start charging for certain videos than it is to build a movie house or a projection room? Netflix and Amzon's VOD do this already.

My question was to speculate whether, in your mind, this will happen to games and will it stick? Will we eventually see our gaming lives/experience moved from the desktop to a browser-like environment and to what extent will this be possible/happen eventually?

Apart from the fact that one is thus far free and the other one is not, also try thinking of it this way: production-wise, what is the principal difference between making a high quality video (not just resolution wise) for Youtube and then distributing it in theaters, and taking a film made for theaters and uploading it to Youtube? That is to say, would it not be far easier to have Youtube start charging for certain videos than it is to build a movie house or a projection room? Netflix and Amzon's VOD do this already.

There is more to draw to a theatre than just watching videos. I can watch any video released this weekend for free on my laptop the day it is released. In some cases you can watch them weeks before they are released. Movies are still raking in cash at the theater despite this being an available, though illegal, option to the majority of the theatre going world.

What you describe in your OP is steam.

When the ENTIRE world is connected then, browser-centric software (apps, games, etc) will be more ubiquitous. Yes, even more so than it is now. But I believe that digital distribution will find its place as a common thing to do far quicker than digtial-do-everything-on-the-cloud. Also, with technology like say, Silverlight, Flash, JavaFX, the line between Web App and Desktop App is blurring. HTML5 videos and graphics being hardware-accelerated and such. So the transition will happen, but how do you get around the "I'm not connected to the Web" issue? Which will be an issue for a long time.

Ive written a few webgl games in the last couple of months (ill see if I can knock another one off this weekend), (TECH note - the thing lacking ATM is sound)
too me the great thing about it is the long desired dream, write once, play everywhere is finally becoming reality (still a ways to go until this happens though) itll be great in a few decades when Im an old fart, to browse to a site & play a game I wrote & for it to just work (fingers crossed)

My question was to speculate whether, in your mind, this will happen to games and will it stick? Will we eventually see our gaming lives/experience moved from the desktop to a browser-like environment and to what extent will this be possible/happen eventually?[/quote]Its already happened on the PC, farmville or whatever is the most played PC game.
The question is will it happen on consoles/phones etc

What you describe in your OP is steam.

No, what I'm talking about is the implementation-independent distribution of games through a browser, which Steam is not.


>> [color=#CCCCCC][size=2]Its already happened on the PC, farmville or whatever is the most played PC game. [color=#CCCCCC][size=2]The question is will it happen on consoles/phones etc
[color=#CCCCCC][size=2]

[color="#CCCCCC"][color=#000000]

No - FarmVille adheres to a completely different sales model and as soon as you look at it as a game and not a business model, it's utter crap (it's not even a game at its core). Moreover, Famville broke new ground because of Zynga's previous product, MafiaWars, and the result is that:
[color="#CCCCCC"][color=#000000]

1) FarmVille is an HTML-ased product, which makes it platform-oblivious (eg non-PC specific)
2) it in no way qualifies as a traditional game

FarmVille is a business model with an UI, nothing more. Its production has cost millions because of its marketing methodology and platform, not because of its base code or the technology involved.

Quake in the browser is in no way demonstrating the capability of the browser for games. It's been possible virtually for ever, certainly IE6 supports it. QuakeLive (unless you meant a proper port?) is a C++ app which renders inside the browser, not a web-app.

[quote name='way2lazy2care' timestamp='1299253470' post='4781770']
What you describe in your OP is steam.

No, what I'm talking about is the implementation-independent distribution of games through a browser, which Steam is not.
[/quote]
How do you figure? Steam doesn't work through any browser, but steam could be considered a browser that is tightly linked to a specific service, and it's as implementation independent as anything right now.

I think that a major factor here is that the games you describe aren't the driving force of technology. With movies, films are released in X format, and then people upgrade to that format to get the new movies. Witness BetaMax->VCR->DVD->BluRay. This is not the case with games, particularly with browser based games. No one bought a computer (or even started a facebook account) to play Farmville. But because those platforms exist, Farmville could exist too. These games will always be exploiting the capabilities of popular infrastructure-- but browser games aren't driving the marketplace or changes to it. That's left to the huge studio projects or broadly unrelated industries. Until the medium of the internet expands to allow huge budget titles to succeed especially well in that format, I don't see why that will change.

I would dispute your point that the explosion in browser games has changed the nature of gaming as a whole. While browser games are generally shallow, what might be called the "traditional" game industry has continued to expand. The video game industry spent as much last year on games as Hollywood did on movies-- and browser games aren't a big chunk of that. While it's true that a lot of browser games are produced, it's also true that more non-browser games are produced than ever, including some crummy titles and some incredible ones.

What's happening is that developers are opening a new audience, while the old audience continues on as it has before. Those new audience members aren't going to rush out and buy the newest console or upgrade with the latest video card; they didn't before browser games, and they won't now, whether you're offering them the next WoW or just Farmville 2.

As the above effects take hold, the ability to produce games becomes more valuable, and so you have more people developing that ability and devoting more time and energy to it. Yes, that means floods of crap. But it also means an expanding number of developers with ever-higher levels of skill. Distribution methods will emerge to help separate the wheat from the chaff, making it easier for good games to be promoted (and so making them even more valuable to create). More incentives to produce more and higher quality titles will lead to more developers and more games. But there will still be a lot of the population that is only interested in the depth of today's browser game, and so they will continue to exist and succeed as well.