Hey guys I thought I might start a discussion. Whats everyone's thoughts on the future of HTML5 as a gaming platform? Could it be a contender with other serious platforms such as PC and consoles(Not flash)? I know it supports hardware acceleration, has gamepad API's, numerous game engines and is completely cross platform. so why hasn't it yet been taken seriously? would you ever be able to monetize the games or have a game store like steam?
It still hasn't fully come into it's own yet in my opinion but I am starting to see it more often. I didn't bother updating flash for a while so firefox shut it down but most sites ran without any real issues. I also watched some shows, yes, I admit to watching anime, and noticed it's getting easier and easier to find video players coded in html. I expect that with the html5 suppoert Unity has that we will be seeing more games built on the tech in the future. There's also the fact that I think Adobe announced that they will be phasing out Flash in favor of developing html5 tech and they make Flash. As for the specific gaming question, I expect it will be more common and spread to other platforms some as Flash fades.
I heard that they want to keep flash but use it for animation only (or something like that). Do you think one day it will make consoles redundant? Will we ever be able to monetise it enough to have game stores for them and would people pay, since it's been free for so long? It would be cool because it would be like being able to play your steam games but on any device and where ever you are. It's interesting to see
Valve is pushing SteamOS along with their Steam based consoles so I doubt they would be embracing anything that could take out part of their own business model. Either way, I doubt Html5 will become THE dominant language for gaming. I don't see tool developrs like Unity dropping the primary coding languages their tech is built on because those are the languages the majority of developers are familiar with. It's a bit of a self perpetuating cycle I think because up and coming game programmers will usually seek to learn what is currently utilized.
I'm coming back to making games again and one of the platform I looked at was HTML 5. Not only is it a good replacement for the super bloated Flash/Unity plugins, it is quite easy to pick up. You can roll out a 2D Platform game written in JavaScript, or use a framework like Phaser or PhotonStorm. You can write a hardware accellerated WebGL 3D FPS game using Three.js. You can even write a 3D MMO game by writing the server code using Node.js! So, moving forward, I really think HTML 5 is not only a serious contender, but will ultimately be the first one people look at in the future.
There is some potential in HTML5 but I don't think it's worth it to develop just for it. Maybe if you plan to develop very simple game that would run only on browsers, then why not. But if starting with small project with plan to expand it later I thing it doesnt make much sense because you could also build for Web in Unity and then you could also build a proper game for PC/mobiles. Even for smaller projects I would prefer Unity (or any other game engine) just in case I would want to expand it in the future.