Monthly Archives: January

Adam Martin has posted an interesting Article called “2010 and the Browser MMO” at his blog T-Machine, essentially raising the question, how a contemporary browser MMO should look and feel like:

“It’s 2010. I know a lot of people in the industry still haven’t accepted even the concept of a “browser-based” MMO, let alone realise where they’ve got to now…

For a look at today, go browse some of the Unity demos. Unity is *not* the “best” 3D engine, the fastest, the best language – but it’s nicely balanced towards ease of adoption. It’s very easy for new developers to get into. And so it’s setting a very achievable base standard that’s higher than many people would believe. With anyone able to produce 3D to this level, and embed it in the browser almost as an afterthought, the use of plugins becomes a new landscape…“

I would argue that this is an issue for every “serious” browser-game: probably 99% percent of all browser-games currently run on Flash, but Flash is not powerful enough to render graphics comparable to modern “professional” games—or even to 3D-environments like Unity. With the advent of new browser-plug-ins like Unity and others, the bar for good-looking browser-game-graphics is raised dramatically. The more people playing such 3D-games, or using services like Gaikai and OnLive during he next years, the higher the expectation will be how a “good-looking” browser-game should look like.

In my opinion, Adobe needs to react quickly to expand Flash’s capabilities soon. Hardware-acceleration, import of 3D-assets or some specialized Actionscript-libraries might be an idea. Otherwise, Flash-based games might soon be the equivalent of the Javascript- and applet-games of some 10 years ago.