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Game Devs Predict Death of Flash, Installed Games
New submitter rescendent writes "In an interview with Massively, Illyriad Games developers Ben Adams and James Niesewand predict the death of Flash, the rise of HTML5, and a long-term shift away from installed games. Quoting: 'The major advantages that boxed set or download games have had over browser-based games are local storage and direct access to the graphics and audio engines. Those barriers are being smashed apart by HTML5. ... Especially for MMO game developers, I personally don't believe that developers have any real long-term choice about embarking on this path or not. Ultimately, I believe it's either browser-based or obsolescence. If you don't do it, your competitors will, and they'll be making games that work identically on more device platforms, on more browsers, on more operating systems. It's going to take a very long time to get there, though, but this change has begun now, and we firmly believe that HTML5 is the future.' With Microsoft joining the ranks of Apple and not supporting Flash in Windows 8, there's definitely a risk to Flash. But will browser-based games really replace installed games?"
Microsoft has said that Windows 8 will support Flash, it will just be disabled if you view a page in the Metro UI. I can't imagine many people doing that beyond on a tablet like it is intended for.
Internet on the customer side needs to be several magnitutes faster to accomodate the same graphic fidelity
But for html5 replacing flash in these parts we do need DOM-Bindings for Bytecode now more than ever. It would be so great to write code in a language of my choice and compile it to Browser-Bytecode with DOM-Bindings. This would make it possible to deliver more proprietary code without making browser-plugins or something similar.
Especially for MMO game developers
About that part, yeah fair enough. And Flash games can't die soon enough. But that is one thing and another thing is to predict the death of "Installed Games". Look at the HTML5 version of Quake II - on an Atom netbook you get something like, 6fps? While the native runs smoothly on a 100 Mhz machine.
The barriers aren't being 'smashed apart'. They're being lowered, gradually. There's still a massive difference between games written in Javascript/WebGL and C++/OpenGL. It isn't even comparable yet.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Sorry, but you're not going to be able to replicate World of Warcraft in Javascript. It's not happening. Ever. The language just isn't built to do something that huge without collapsing under its own poor design decisions... not to mention minor details like needing to stream and locally cache several GB of textures and audio files.
This only flies if you believe the future of "gaming" is what Flash games currently are: small, simple time wasters. For anything that's currently considered an AAA game, the idea that this stuff will replace it is a joke.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I think that's a long enough time frame, by then we'll all have wireless internet everywhere at speeds a hundred times as fast as your best wired connection now.
Seriously. This isn't news, it's a repost of someone else's slow news day.
Maybe I'm a little prejudiced, (I'm a game dev working on a more traditional MMO right now), but our customers still seem to be interested high-fidelity worlds, complete with rich graphics and audio. People have been shouting about how the thin client is the future for a decade or more now, and it simply never happens. There's still something to be said for the ability to create high-performance applications that can be run directly on the user's machine, in native code. We do incredibly demanding things, and the fact of the matter is that until we literally have more performance than we know what to do with, native binaries will always have a huge advantage when it comes to manipulating and displaying high-fidelity virtual worlds.
Naturally, there are plenty of opportunities in more specialized, smaller, niche markets, but to say everything is going that direction is a bit far-fetched. Granted, we're not oblivious to this direction, as we have a small team working on a lot of web-based and mobile integration initiatives, but I really hate when people are so quick to come to some sort of "all or nothing" conclusion about any new emerging market or technology.
Will HTML5 eventually kill Flash? Probably, if there is really good tool support. It it going to be the be-all and end-all for future MMOs? Yes and no... there will certainly be a move there, especially among games with lighter requirements, but big-budget native clients are going to be with us for quite a while still.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Seriously, I've never heard of these guys. Looking in to it, they've created an HTML 5 game. Ok, wonderful, but two things about that:
1) Making one game does not make you an expert. They've managed to make a single (presumably successful) game. Ok, fine. I can point to thousands of successful non-HTML 5 games. If EA was saying this, I'd maybe give it some credit, but these guys have shown that you can make a game in HTML 5 (which we already knew) not that everything is going that way.
2) They may have some bias, given that their one and only game is HTML 5. They think they've found the One True Way(tm) and perhaps are a little blinded by that.
Personally I think they are dead wrong. Installed games are going to remain popular in part because people might like to be able to play a game when the Internet goes out or is unavailable, and let's please not pretend like that never happens. Also there is an issue of game resources. I happen to like games with cool graphics and sound. However those games often seem to need 5-20GB to pull that off. You propose to do that in HTML 5?
This is all ignoring the performance issue.
I'm sure we'll continue to see plenty of web games. We saw them back before HTML 5, it'll only help things. However I don't think everything will move that way. You might notice that no game technology has killed off the old ones. Handhelds didn't kill consoles, phones didn't kill handhelds, casual games didn't kill involved ones, and so on. Different games for different markets.
predict the death of Flash, the rise of HTML5, and a long-term shift away from installed games
Death of Flash, and rise of HTML5? Flash was already an order of magnitude faster than HTML5 in some cases, and they claim it's more than another order of magnitude faster now. Flash is a single platform, HTML5 is a whole bunch of browsers, each of which is free to render differently. Flash runs places where you'd have trouble running Firefox (you can run a stand alone player.) Need I go on?
and a long-term shift away from installed games
How long-term? We don't have the bandwidth for everyone to use OnLive all the time, and even if we did, it's an inferior experience. Or do you just mean games that don't require install? That's not happening until games are distributed on solid state media.
Did not RTFA. Will not.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So, an HTML5 developer that nobody's ever heard of thinks HTML5 is the way to go and not Flash and certainly not the installed games that are making Steam so successful because everybody just loves those "free to play" games and is flocking to them and abandoning games you have to pay for. Do I have that about right?
This is big news.
You are welcome on my lawn.
This idea that somehow there'll be a magical technology that will allow for super fast wireless everywhere has no real foundation in reality. The reason is that pesky thing, Shannon's law: C = B * log2 (1+ S/N). What the means is the total bits per second you are going to get C, is dependent on the bandwidth in hertz, B, of the channel and it's signal-to-noise ratio, S/N. To get more data you have to either increase SNR or increase bandwidth.
Well, in a wired world, this isn't that hard to do. Just increase the frequency. Ultimately going optical does a great job. When you are talking light waves which are in the hundreds of terahertz, well getting a channel that is a THz wide is perfectly possible. Even SNR can be improved to an extent, if needed, with better shielding, more power, and so on. What's more, every wire (or fiber) is its own, dedicated, channel. So a wire going to you and one going to me share nothing. We each get all the bandwidth.
Not so in the world of wireless. There are hard limits on SNR because of ambient noise, and limits on transmission power and that whole inverse square law. You can't very well have mobile devices with 1000 watt transmitters, not if you want things on battery, never mind the other problems.
Bandwidth is perhaps even a bigger problem. The thing is, different frequency ranges have different properties. Something like 60GHz might sound great for having a wide channel, but it gets attenuated by air, never mind walls. The low frequencies punch through better, but you end up with a more narrow channel. If you are operating in the 700MHz range you aren't having a 1GHz channel.
Then of course everyone in a given area has to share the bandwidth. Whatever you have available on a channel, everyone using it shares it. 100mbps doesn't sound so impressive if 50 people are all sharing it.
These things are why the latest and greatest Wireless N struggles to push 200mbps effective data rate, single duplex, under the best conditions yet gigabit ethernet is cheap as hell and has been available for around 2 decades.
Whatever we can do with wires, wireless will always be much slower. As a practical matter, long(ish) range wireless like LTE and so on are never going to be all that blazingly fast, particularly when everyone is using them heavily. Building out networks and cutting down segment size helps, as do new technologies, but you aren't going to see wireless in the same arena as wired.
Traditionally the "cache" has been called an "installation".
You can install another browser that does support plug-ins
No, Microsoft can install another browser on your device through the Metro app store and has every right to decline to do so, just as Apple has declined to approve browsers that run on an iOS device other than its own Safari. Did you miss the recent story that all Metro style applications must be digitally signed by Microsoft?
Game Devs Predict Death of Flash, Installed Games, meanwhile ISPs introduce bandwidth caps, usage limits, per-MB pricing dashing the game devs hopes.
Yea, you're going to run streaming video @ 1920x1080 and up, with surround sound and 0 latency for an MMO that addicts are going to play for 12hrs+ per day and the ISPs are just going to roll over and take it... I think not.
I already warned my Comcast local they would lose me if they try it, and they haven't.
I'm guessing that Comcast chooses to introduce caps in those markets where it has the least competition. Such caps might be harshest in markets where the only competitor is dial-up. Perhaps you live in a market with fiber to the home or really fast DSL.
I think by the time we have some type of unified platform that all games will be developed for regardless of OS or hardware.. HTML5 will have already been relegated to the dustbin of history as an obsolete standard. I am not saying this to knock HTML5, but to highlight just how far off such a unification probably is.
Personally, this interview, to me reads like developers who see only their own domain and are forgetting to take into account all the other domains within gaming... ones where writing to the specific hardware is important, where multiplayer and network access are not important at all, etc etc.