Browser games will never come back outside of proof of concept “hacking”. Even the exemplars the article listed, Celeste and Terrarria, are ports.
And a large part of that is because there is no longer a strong need for them. People wanting a quick way to kill time already have their phones in their pocket. Similarly, Steam et al make releasing even games at this scale borderline trivial. And the same tools that are used to make a “browser game” are used to make a “desktop game” and so forth.
It is similar to why we don’t see anywhere near the same amount of game mods we used to and most of the biggies are legacy projects that have been in development since the early 00s or are spiritual successors (think: Skyblivion and the like). The effort to make a TC/browser game is basically the same as making a “real” game… and using the same tools.
And that doesn’t go into The Internet being a very different place. Back in the 00s? Executing random code with a five year old version of flash would just mean you get porn pop-ups and need to reformat. Now? Viruses are specifically designed to encrypt all your personal data for ransomware or to silently wait until the next time you access your bank account and so forth. Let alone just stealing a steam account to buy a bunch of fifa bucks or whatever.
missingno@fedia.io 18 hours ago
Porting two existing titles is hardly what I would consider a new golden age.
Browser games peaked in the 00s-10s as the most accessible place to publish a simple indie project. It was simple and easy for beginner developers to just make something and put it out there, and for those that took off there was a decent pipeline to monetize a hit by licensing it to sites that would share a cut of ad revenue.
But now, mobile and Steam have replaced that as the go-to target for developers. They've gotten to a point where they're just as accessible to develop for, and if you want to make a living off your work you'll have a much better shot that way.
Plenty of great tools still exist for HTML5 development, if developers wanted to they could, and some do. Itch.io has a good amount of new browser games, they exist.
But there's never going to be anything as big as Newgrounds or Kongregate. Those days are gone for good.
Beacon@fedia.io 17 hours ago
https://poki.com/
https://developers.poki.com/
And
https://crazygames.com/
https://developer.crazygames.com/
Rozz@lemmy.sdf.org 16 hours ago
Most of crazy games is ad-riddled ports of ad-riddled mobile games with no depth. It’s hard to find good games there.
missingno@fedia.io 17 hours ago
Will never be anywhere close to what Newgrounds and Kongregate were at their peak.