Session: Browser Gaming Is The Future, Chris Taylor, Kanoogi

[Music] thank you [Music] and the next one is a solo talk by Chris Taylor of Carnegie browser gaming is the future uh come on up Chris all right it's been like five years since I did any public speaking so I apologize in advance for any crazy that happens in the next hour or so I know or half 20 minutes yeah I was I was just to see if you were listening that's yeah see how I did that it's amazing okay some of you don't know who I am and that's actually probably a good thing um basically um I've been making games now

for 35 years which is really strange to have those words literally come out of my mouth um I basically have been doing a lot of work for it's gosh since like 2009 2010 on web I never liked the browser I thought it was really weak and I was like a hardcore PC game developer but I mean I just fell in love with what you can do on the web but of course my company gas powered games we made hardcore PC games this next slide actually is some of the games that some of you may remember from the olden days okay some of you actually may have played these games uh this will go this goes all the way back to like 1989 okay and then I think that shipped in 91 or 92 total Annihilation 97 Dungeon Siege 2002 Supreme Commander 2006. and then there's this like what have you done for me lately Gap but I did sell my company to war gaming

and uh we were working on a big wargaming title um that's what happens when you sell your company things crazy things happen and uh it's not like the old days so actually I feel for a lot of folks here uh well in the gaming business overall that the business has really God it's gotten it's gotten so competitive and it's gotten so complicated that I really feel sort of lucky that I got these golden years of game development in before things got nuts but that's not very inspiring is it to say that like holy you've really got it rough sorry about that um but anyways I want to do something fun so I want to do something kind of weird hopefully this has never happened to you before I always ask this question how many of you hate voting with your hand how many really find that annoying as hell yeah me too okay um okay thank you I'll listen to you guys up 10

to this afternoon um I'm gonna be walking home later like what happened so um the the real fun vote is how many of you just think that browser gaming sucks okay like you're just dead against it okay we got a couple of people here two three so really that's not what I was looking for I was looking for like I wanted like more like I wanted a lot of people that thought it really sucked because then at the end I'm gonna ask you to vote again and I'm going to see if I got some converts so I've only got like five people over here that I have to convert to the Church of web browser gaming so not a big loot haul if I pull that off uh but the bar is low so there's that all right all right okay so let's go to the next slide so you guys know that when Netscape released Netscape Navigator that was almost 30 years ago right that's kind of amazing it was just this shitty thing that you know transformed the world we live in um where you could look at stuff on the internet data would be visualized right

like a terminal with graphics and I don't think a single person said oh my God this is going to turn into a virtual operating system and get really exciting and interesting nobody said that not no and nobody said that I don't even think uh Tim and um the gang at Netscape said that and do you guys know that Tim invented um the World Wide Web off the side of his desk while he worked at CERN anybody do you guys realize that that's crazy to me God I hope I got that right too you can Google it or you can chat GPT it now but would you get an answer you're not quite sure so you want to go to Bard and double check um whoever's slipping the slides just say who's flipping the slides they're right on you're right you guys are right on the God I'm gonna take you home oh there's a clicker oh oh no no I like this this is like you're just you're in my head okay so um all right okay let's get serious

so you guys know there's 6.8 billion smartphones like when I pulled that number up like three years ago it was like I don't know I was like 2.4 or 2.8 I mean you know this is crazy it's like almost everyone on the Earth is going to have a smartphone except for people who don't have electricity and internet but except for the it's turning out that that group's getting smaller too but so like if you're building something on a web browser you know you can run it on all those all those phones and if you can't run it today well then five years from now you certainly will see the whole point of what I'm talking about here today is the fact that forget about what's happening today where will this all be in five years where will it be in 10 years we already burned through 30 and we saw a lot of change so I'm telling you like when I look at where okay I started with 16k okay on my TRS-80 in 1980. if you had told me that I'd be browsing my new Macbook Pro and going well how much for 96 gigs of RAM okay because I'm capable of transporting

myself back to 1980 and going holy I had 16k and I didn't even use it all up actually I upgraded before I needed it so now I'm looking at 96 gig so really what will how many gigs will my MacBook have in 10 years you can make up any number you want a terabyte two terabytes it'll be some cool base two number somebody no somebody raised their hand I know the answer oh good so we have like um almost 2 billion PC Gamers I pulled up some numbers 1.7 1.8 PC Gamers um billion um there's tablets there's televisions and there's more I have a smart fridge I have a Samsung family smart fridge I built a game in the browser at the company I work at just for fun it was a fun project ran it on my refrigerator took a picture sent it on slack to everybody and they're like holy that's cool I gotta get a refrigerator like that okay that was like the takeaway message how much was for how much was that I'm like it's only 500 more than a regular

refrigerator but think about it everything will have a chipset that has a screen because it will be it's commoditized it's a race to the bottom right these things are going to be like so cheap it's like an extra 10 bucks your toaster you can you know watch videos while you're waiting for your toast okay the good news for all of us that are on the believer's side right your game can be played or you can get status updates or whatever you're into right so really the potential of web is unlimited you guys all know somebody who's releasing their game on the PC and they are like well Mac we don't know about Mac yet and Linux uh maybe we'll do Linux before Mac and you're like oh but for the web guys they're like well we're everywhere already we just have a bunch of edge cases that are a pain in the ass so you know I want to talk about why I don't like I think I I think I had a name like things I don't like I don't like paying somebody 30 royalty okay so you know you

see you're coming over to my side now right you don't want to pay anybody 30 yeah that's a really good point you don't like censorship right Big Brother 1984 you don't want that either right when I launched stuff on the web I do whatever the hell I like right except I got to take care of privacy pii it's really important but other than that I go crazy I go nuts um slow release velocity is something I can't stand right so like I don't want to release something um when the folks at you know the platform owners hey I can release it I want to release it whenever I want I want to be Whimsical I want to be able to roll it back I want to do stuff quick okay and of course there's terrible discoverability now I mean how many thousands of games release on Steam every week I heard a number at dice I was at dice I forget what the number was the number was huge like ridiculous like thousands thousands of games a week if your son or daughter is making a game

in the basement and they're like this is going to be the next valheim you know you're just like oh because you know that they're probably not going to pull it off because it's a lotto but when you can create something in a web browser and you can be at school with your friends and you can say hey check out this game I made you have a shot at creating some virality right there on the spot with your social network and everything else and you don't care what kind of Hardware they're running the browser has become an abstracted virtual operating system with true power okay with true power I'll talk about some of some of the pitfalls obviously because I'm just you know I can't just stand up here and talk about all the good stuff so we have some issues that we have to deal with on the browser right we have a security not a security for the customer they get all kinds of security that's why they love that uh that sandbox right because you're not going to be able to get into their file system you ever install an app on your Mac and it says you trust this Source or this developer oh hell do I know if I trust him I don't

even know him sure I trust apple or I trust Microsoft or I trust some big company but I really don't know who beyond that if I really trust them and what if the people that worked there got something snuck in there so you can really never trust anybody right if you're installing a native app on your machine but when you're in a browser you sleep at night pretty well sure there's security vulnerabilities but you actually feel pretty comfortable running some crazy stuff in your browser but security was a problem for the developer who made the game you made a really cool web game let's say someone could just rip it off right because it can bust open the console grab the JavaScript and they'd be they could take your they could take your Source prettify it and boom and that was a problem and it is solvable now because we have the cloud now in the cloud like the public cloud like AWS Azure gcp um we had a problem with performance when Brenda Nike invented JavaScript almost like a joke I think he did it like a couple of weeks and he or playfully made took the name Java and

got into that big Java JavaScript problem you know he probably was just like I'm just doing something powerful but it doesn't have to be performant well that problem has been fixed it got to the point where it was fixed really really well but then webassembly came along and talk about completely fix it okay webassembly is so fast and so powerful and so performant that if you're creating a game in c-sharp or in Java and your or webassembly it is going to run at the same or more performant speeds okay so that speed problem is gone and you have this Tech right we talked about webassembly web GPU in Chrome 113 how many of you are like really waiting web GPU anybody or not a single person that's weird okay well web GPU is freaking awesome they took the best of from um DirectX Vulcan um got a bunch of other you know and this web GPU is incredibly powerful and

it can do all the things okay so if you're into all the things that you can do with Graphics in your games um web GPU is going to do it now that was really just hot air when it hadn't shipped right but it's shipped and it's coming to all the other major players there's luckily there's only four or five of them um you know Microsoft Edge runs all the Chrome Tech Opera runs the Chrome Tech um uh you know and Mozilla is right in there and of course Apple so you've really got this this this uh competition to stay let's just keep up and and Google has done a miraculous job of leading but they're all compatible now right remember when you had to have a poly fill to run on all the different and you're just like holy cow and you gave up performance for that benefit well now that is over those days are done um web audio doesn't seem to be important to a lot of people but it is pretty damn

awesome and it fills in sort of the trifecta of cool technology okay the next slide um are the headaches that are gone I kind of talked about that already um the browsers are really highly compatible now so your Dev team doesn't have to spend all this time developing across all these different browsers um the dev tools I mean come on if you've been inside a Chrome's Dev tools Suite oh my God if I had that in 1988 that would have been amazing okay the tech is so good everything is so good about it it's just like I'm just I actually have to take time out to have a little cry okay like this is so freaking amazing this is unbelievable um and they're they're they're they're always advancing everything and I'm like whoa who are these people so um and the standards are open so you don't have anyone creating a monopoly situation the Monopoly thing went away thank you to Google for that I'm not a total Google fanboy

but I kind of am in this particular context because of what Google did for us in the browser and they had the insight to realize it was going to become a virtual operating system obviously they made they pushed that okay to make that happen so I really really do appreciate that moving pretty quick here um so you got something that's incredibly accessible it's performant you can build something that's really viral I mean hey we've all got a friend who says oh you got to download this game you got an iPhone you got to download this game blah blah blah blah and you're like yeah sure because I'm busy but when you can just push a link and boom you're in a game just like that and it's an awesome game right that's kind of hard to resist the friction goes so low so the virality is high and that is awesome the attention spans seem to be getting shorter and shorter like I didn't think attention spans could really go any lower okay like they're they're just it's like approaching zero at 17 decimal places okay elephant rescues boy from

raging River okay yeah I get it it's not loading ah screw it you know and you're like oh I gave it two seconds to load come on you know um I just made that up that's what happens I blame Canada um did I miss one on the end of that oh the development house we talked about that we talked about how you can just cut your development costs and be on all these platforms I mean come on it's so it's getting to be so good now I can't I just like I can't believe that like when you look at an EA or any of the other big players that they're not aggressively investing in this space and building games in this space now maybe they have and I'm not paying attention so if you guys know any different let me know um more benefits right you don't have to apply patches and updates because they happen transparently if you're in Miro or lucidchart or in one of the other productivity apps online right which are pretty heavy sophisticated apps these things cost they're they're the they're already there okay I'm playing the part tonight or to this afternoon as Captain

Obvious okay yes Captain Obvious the browser is powerful and if I were to run a productivity app and someone were to say you have to install this on your machine we have a native app for Windows or Mac I'd say why why my productivity hops are way better in a browser way better I will never go back no none of us will okay so the future is absolutely productivity apps so of course if you just keep extrapolating on a line it'll be you know small footprint games medium footprint games gigantic games and we can talk about Footprints and egress costs as well because those are all things that become an issue you have portability I'm on my phone I whip to my laptop I go to my tablet I'm on my refrigerator I can go anywhere I have to get the native app for my refrigerator okay like what that's awesome if I'm at my desktop

and I want to throw open three windows and I just went and bought a I got my TV I threw my TV on my desk because my debt my TV was pretty good and suddenly I've had this giant screen and I can just throw some stuff on that screen from the game I'm playing because you know it's a web thing so I can just boom open another window right where developers like we were at Gaspard games how much time have I got left oh it's right there I have a minute and a half holy um like we had to write complicated extra technology for multi-month support any Supreme Commander fans who were like multi-moon yeah right huh it was like come on that was complicated well with web it's not even anything right um and you know your multiplayer is just insanely easy because you're building everything off the cloud so you have an authoritative model running in the cloud and you just don't have any problems whatsoever with multiplayer in my opinion having been part of so many different multiplayer coding um uh experiences you know with

synchronous and asynchronous and all of that well then my son is calling I'll just hang that up um you know I mean come on imagine if I took that that'd be weird you'd be talking about it for minutes okay let's vote again now um the guys who raise their hand who said that they still they think web gaming sucks do you still think web gaming sucks thank you very much okay thank you appreciate it okay so you guys are too embarrassed you're like I don't think so I don't have anything to do with this I know you are so that's it that's it and we have 23 seconds perfect so uh great yeah I mean how do you how does that even happen I know you oh okay yeah I know you too okay I've been designing games since 1970 so I do oh you got me beat yeah damn it oh so I I've got a game which is uh the idea is that the non-premium version would be free on the web and

then I want to put it in the App Store as a premium version um and I want to take the the code that I have and just sort of keep it the same but somehow make it into an app is that be taking care of that for me or do I have to do it the hard way well everything you got to do yourself I mean I'm here just to tell I'm here to remind everyone that the browser has become this incredibly powerful virtual operating system that's the whole thing it's not only great for gaming it's great for every piece of software written okay but when it comes to the actual like software development strategy that you're implementing at your game company and you get your game out there on web and it's got a lot of potential so you decide to hire some folks in a country that have become experts at low-cost development conversion of something to iOS or Android well absolutely I mean sure why not you can do it but that's going to cost you and you have to have that

roadmap so um I I what's great about web is it doesn't close the door on anything else and you use your same back end right you're going to use your same back-end Cloud solution I went off into Enterprise Cloud for three years okay I've been on this thing if you go to my website canoogie.com I pour out my heart and soul it's really sad um because I'm too honest and I will tell you that I went off to do Enterprise Cloud through covid and then I kind of got really into it and it's like Enterprise cloud is freaking amazing and awesome and if you're a game developer and you're an engineer go do um uh to go do a cloud Guru spend 45 bucks burn through the uh the architecture course you will you can thank me later because this is just going to make your brain go what okay this is amazing what you're gonna how it's gonna influence your engineering skill set as a game as a game engineer okay sorry I had to throw

that in there I don't get kickbacks another question all right yeah I've kind of got two questions so the first one is are there any browser games that you recommend currently there have been um I'm that's a really good question um I you know it's funny because some of the ones that are really good like Slither was so simple and so addictive and I was like what and those guys I think the revenue numbers were in the tens of millions of dollars yeah and um that that's kind of like a breakout example hit and it's you get zom um what's it called zombio I can't remember just do you remember the name of that and that's a pretty sophisticated game I think it's actually developed here in Seattle does anybody know those guys um that's a pretty good that's a pretty damn good game um what I'm um what I'm looking for right is to see

something that where a big publisher has put some money into it and what they can really show what the platform can do but really waiting for that is not likely so I'm building my own platform kanugi and um I realized that I'm a niche game designer so if I build out my Intergalactic space Empire and I was tempted to show you guys like a first look at it and then I chickened out um for good reason really um the um which is uh you know I realize I'm not going to sell much of this this isn't going to be that successful so early on I realized it's really about the platform and then when they asked me to speak I was like I've got to just do a mind dump here and share with you all of the stuff that I've learned and accumulated and bring it and bring it top of mind so that you understand the potential of this platform but until like web GPU I mean webgl like five years ago wasn't even at 100 penetration right and now we've got web GPU and it's

going to take a while so we are literally at the bottom of the hockey stick I predict and you can hold me to this that we're going to see the hockey stick from here and you guys are here to hear it from me and and get a bit of an edge sure and uh my other question was we have a lot of Indie devs here who are fantastic and made amazing games but not really browser supported but how has Cloud hosting become useful in that regard and is it easy to have all these games be hosted on the web even if they're not built for the web such a good question because when you take one step into Enterprise cloud you can be really thrown back across the room because of the complexity and you have to really swallow the whole thing you have to start to understand when you're standing up servers at different costs and you have to understand egress which I apologize I didn't get a chance to talk about okay egress is like you're going to live or die based on how much data you're continually sending out of

your data center in other words you're going to make all this revenue from your customers you're going to hand it all to the cloud provider so that doesn't do you much good right so when I I can tell you that as I was a game developer trying to focus on gameplay systems and my my logic and my emotional content and my story and my characters and I had to go out and hire an Enterprise Cloud architect to build up the back end it's just like no it's too much it's too much so there's a huge opportunity for companies to provide a turnkey solution and there have been but I don't think they're there yet and that's where I come in with canoe I'm like I know what a game developer wants they need a clean API and they need a way to just know that this thing is going to scale up instances gaming instances on the back end and then they're going to shut those down and they're not we're not going to burn a lot of compute on the back end it's a money game when you're in the Enterprise Cloud space as much of you as many of you know so yeah hope that helped I think we're

gonna have to leave it there because our panel are all here so around the reports for Chris Taylor [Applause] incredible thank you very much Chris I appreciate it uh Chris has been supporting uh PGC Seattle since we started in 2019 I think so thanks for coming again [Music] [Applause] thank you