I read in one of the articles that Gree (I think) was going to make a browser that allowed people to play their games in the browser. Paid games at that. I was wondering if anyone has done such a thing at all. And do we really need proprietary browsers to accomplish such a thing?

Are you talking HTML5/JavaScript style paid game, where you would have to purchase the game? I haven't heard of any. I was going to give it a shot until I learned you can't properly loop audio without FireFox/Chrome specific JavaScript extensions. HTML5/JavaScript need to mature more, IMO, because I'm not about to install a special Internet browser (maybe if they didn't call it a browser I'd would seem more okay with it, for whatever reason).

Are you talking HTML5/JavaScript style paid game, where you would have to purchase the game?

Yes, I am. A Javascript/Canvas game where you have to purchase the game or do something subscription based.

It's not uncommon for phone and tablet games to be written in HTML5/JS. I've seen quite a few, and two of my games are written in HTML/JS. You'd be surprised what you can do with WebGL on a tablet -- it was lots of fun.

I was going to give it a shot until I learned you can't properly loop audio without FireFox/Chrome specific JavaScript extensions.

You can do a good bit with the <audio> tag. It's supported in most desktop browsers and various mobile platforms. It's a bit of a pain though. Things are much better with the Web Audio API, though broad support is going to take a while.

I was going to give it a shot until I learned you can't properly loop audio without FireFox/Chrome specific JavaScript extensions.

I'm 100% sure you can...

HTML5's audio support is just fine, at least unless you want to do wacky things like complex 3D sound processing and the like (but for just playing sounds with panning and volume control (and some more) it should be fine - I would say generation on the fly doesn't work either but the data protocol can be used as a workaround...). The problem is that browser support is... kind of broken. Besides the fact there isn't a single format supported by all browsers (not even WAV, because Chrome doesn't support WAV apparently) there's the issue that playing multiple sounds at the same time is hit and miss, and there's also latency to cope with. Opera kind of spoiled me on this at first, since audio playback works 100% perfect there, and this was when the tag was just introduced =P (no lag, no limit on sounds playing at the same time, etc.).

That's probably the biggest issue with HTML5, it isn't so much the standard that's an issue but the implementations.

Honestly, I think the key for this kind of distribution (Plugin-less, HTML5) is not to sell the game as a product, but as a service. Any single-player game can and will be cracked, but this would be especially easy for a game coming in down the wire mostly unencrypted -- its practically a guarantee that if your game was successful at all that someone would essentially spider your game and start hosting it themselves. But if you're offering as part of the game an on-going service thats managed by back-end code, the bar for successful theft is much higher. Minimally you'd want login/authentication, but the value-adds of an ongoing service (new content, online stats, community, etc) gives you a reasonable cause to require an online connection.

Now, Google has a payment API for chrome apps that works with the Chrome browser and ChromeOS, which might work as well, its part of the browser, but at least a widely available and popular browser that many people have anyway.

Now, all this depends on your tolerance for piracy -- If you accept, like I do, that a pirate is a pirate and not likely to pay you regardless of convenience, price, or value, then go ahead and make a single-player game and toss it out there.

[quote name='Cornstalks' timestamp='1353013730' post='5001345']I was going to give it a shot until I learned you can't properly loop audio without FireFox/Chrome specific JavaScript extensions.

I'm 100% sure you can...
[/quote]
You can loop, but not gaplessly. There's a reason if you google gapless audio looping in JavaScript/HTML5, everyone says to use Chrome's Web Audio API or Firefox's Audio Data API. The current standard doesn't guarantee looping playback will be gapless, or that playback will be without delay. Chrome's Web Audio API is currently submitted to W3C as a draft, but is far from being standardized.

There are a lot of paid games that are done for html5, not for browser but for a web container (that is pretty much the same), such for iOS, Android and WP.
In fact, Metro applications (Store Apps) could be created using javascript (on steroids) + html5 or xamp.