Turning to Browsers
From a certain perspective, any victory Mozilla achieves through its properties will encourage other browser developers to use related technologies. "Despite some of our projects and APIs not being cross-platform, we recognize the necessity and are continuously striving to collaborate with other browser developers and W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) to address these issues in the future," said Rob Hawkes, "The Gamepad API is a good example; our leading personnel worked closely with Google to ensure both parties were at the same development stage and coordinated to establish common standards."
A report from Sina Tech stated that on the evening of December 29 Beijing time, Rob Hawkes, Mozilla's technical evangelist, believed that online games would shift towards web standards in the future, hoping that 2012 would become the year leading the transformation of web games.
However, ultimately, the smallest obstacle that web games need to overcome is the different technologies adopted by browsers. We see that many online games can run smoothly on one browser but fail when switched to another. Many games also require the installation of Flash plugins to operate.
Hawkes believes that for the web to become a truly viable gaming platform, some key conditions must be met. He stated: "We need to move away from the perception of web games as merely flashy websites. We need to be able to commercialize games, ensuring that browsers use necessary technologies to support open web games, thereby reducing the competition between platforms."
He further indicated that changes distinguishing future web games from "websites" would come from Mozilla's lab project, Web run-time, which aims to allow any website or game to be installed on a user's operating system as a 'native' application.
In his article, Hawkes discussed methods for handling player identification, providing deeper experiences through full-screen gaming, which included improving mouse input, using game controllers, adding real-time multiplayer game settings, and utilizing local storage. All these are considered challenges that web games need to overcome in the near term, but technological progress is rapid, and significant changes could occur next year.
Hawkes predicted on his blog that future online games would be purely based on web standards applications, hoping that web games in 2012 would transition towards this technology, becoming the year that leads the change in web games. Hawkes hopes Mozilla's overall goal shifts from closed systems to free applications, where applications can be published through various online stores and systems and run on all devices.
Discussing the commercialization of web games, Hawkes believed there were currently only a few solutions. He mentioned: "You have to put the game into a web store or convert an HTML5 game into a native application, then sell it on iOS and Android platforms. However, this model will change, with the biggest challenge being convincing large game studios to release open web games. If they don't, the growth of web games will slow down. Many studios currently do not like the idea of opening their game code and assets, but in the future, they will understand this point."
Technical Challenges
Ultimately, the result will make the development of web games similar to the existing gaming ecosystem, such as games supporting Chrome being sold exclusively in the Chrome web store. "This does not favor the progress of web games, and this is some of the issues we are working hard to solve at Mozilla," Hawkes said: "However, we cannot solve these problems alone. We need users to lobby their browser developers to adopt these technologies, or it will be too late."
"The current environment for web games is not very ideal," Hawkes admitted, "Only Chrome and Firefox have made genuine efforts in web games, Opera has shown partial interest, but Microsoft (Windows) and Apple lack enthusiasm in this area. For example, IE does not support the WebGL 3D graphics standard, which will hinder the web from becoming a gaming platform."
Hawkes pointed out that the current web game model familiar to players involves a frame with numerous ads surrounding the game, but this experience is not sufficient enough. He said: "If games are packaged in this way, you wouldn't be happy with your Xbox 360. The solution to this problem lies in requiring multiple APIs (application programming interfaces), including full-screen API, game controller API, and mouse lock API. These APIs will bring console-style experiences to web games."