Discussion What WebGL games are you people making?

Not sure if this type of post is designed for this forum but I am genuinely curious as I have spent the past year (basically every single day) with Unity WebGL. This is such a hyper specific corner of the game market and it kind of blows my mind that such an amazing technology is not as popular as it deserves.

I’ve been reading these forum posts a lot more and as I read them I’m wondering: “what type of webgl games are these people making that they come here and ask the most hyper niche questions?” Are you guys independent, or do you work with a larger game studio? Are your webgl games profitable, or are you purely doing tt for the art / craft?

Beside the mega game sites like poki or crazygames I think the majority of us webgl folk are just floating around here with absolutely zero data / statistics on our industry. Would be interesting if anyone had any figures / analytics to share.

 

I noticed an uptick in WebGL questions/thread in the forum about 1-2 years ago. I think it may have to do with example projects and tutorials enabling or even focusing on WebGL.

At the same time many of those users had no idea how limited WebGL is, causing issues with expectations ranging from not being able to use specific services or DLLs in WebGL and how much worse the project performed after it was built for WebGL and leading into crashes on mobile because the app was carelessly eating memory (about 500 MB is the upper limit for mobile).

Is WebGL a niche? Compared to other platforms maybe. It‘s hard to monetize, you probably can‘t make any money from ads let alone selling WebGL games. But in the business section those apps are in high demand like product turntables and configurators.

When I started working on ProTiler (see signature) in February and saw some promising results, I decided in March thatI should take that opportunity and make it fail badly. How? Well of course by building it for WebGL!

Much to my surprise the WebGL build worked just as fine after fixing a single issue caused by MeshColliders - those are extremely expensive to instantiate and the tileset I borrowed from the asset store had everything covered in MeshColliders. After I replaced those with BoxColliders the WebGL build - even though it was blindly instantiating game objects all the time - was running at 60 fps.

I have since been using WebGL as the go-to platform for testing the low-end side of things and making sure it runs well on WebGL means it‘ll work (better) on every other platform. At the same time I can run WebGL builds on any platform I like, albeit slower - but I only have to make that one build and don‘t need to go through the hassles of building for mobile, getting a dev account, adding provisioning profiles, etc etc.

I‘d say if you do crossplatform you ought to try to support and test on WebGL because that‘ll help you avoid common pitfalls that cost a lot of performance even on other platforms.