According to Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, in a few years, AAA titles will be playable in a web browser.
The CEO stated in an interview with Gamasutra, “We’re slowly heading in that direction as an industry. You should be able to take any game – a PlayStation 3 or iOS game, for example – and just go to that and play it from any web browser.”
Epic Games has already shown that the Unreal Engine 3 can be run via Adobe Flash in browsers.
Unreal Tournament 3 being played via web browser.Sweeney went on to say, “You give it any C++ program, like Unreal Engine 3, and it translates it to a platform-independent application that can run within Flash, within any web browser or on any platform where Flash runs.” He then added, ”That’s an awesome breakthrough; it shows you the possibilities.”
AAA titles running in web browsers would effectively eliminate the middle man, according to Sweeney.
“I think the next step in that is cross-compiling games from C++ or whatever and directly running them as native HTML5 and JavaScript applications within any standard web browser,” he explained, “In another few years, I think that’s going to be a very realistic scenario. And so the web will generally be a platform, and you can have a real application with a full feature set that runs within a web browser.”
Both OnLive and Gaikai already have proven some games can be played via a web browser through internet streaming. They represent some of the “middle men” who would be eliminated through direct-Flash gameplay.
