Games Community Group meeting - April 2024

Andrzej Mazur: Hello, everybody! Thanks for joining. Today we will be talking about GDC 2024 that happened last month and from the web game developer perspective. And we have a few guests here. We will start with Erik. Can you shortly introduce yourself, and what have you done... What was your presence at GDC?

Erik Dubbelboer: Yeah, sure. So I'm Erik. I work for Poki as one of the tech leads, and this year was a big GDC for Poki, because it was the first year we actually had a booth there. In the chat I pasted a couple of pictures I quickly picked out. It was quite nice, and I was at GDC last year as well, that was my first GDC. My main takeaway is last year I felt like a lot of people were still like, Huh, web? Is that a thing? Not sure? And this year it was bigger, like, lots of people were interested in web actually. A lot of interest at our booth, of course, but just a lot of interest overall from people, where the app store, Steam, they're all super over saturated. Like it's getting worse and worse every year. People are looking for new ways to release their games. And the web is making a comeback in that regards where a lot of developers are now thinking Oh, yeah, let's go for the web!". Even on Mobile. At Poki we're seeing huge growth where, on mobile, before we usually be people playing games through the app stores. Now, people just don't want to install games anymore. So it's happening more. So we got a lot of mobile developers at the booth interested in converting their games to web. Got a lot of interest overall.

Andrzej Mazur: Can we have... We do have other folks who were at the GDC as well. I know Noel has many stories. Can you say a few words first, Noel? Then we can move to other folks who were there at GDC as well. And then we can move to all the stories, starting from Erik.

Noel: Sure. Hello, everyone! I think I pretty much know everyone. Maybe Adam or Rafael, I'm not sure we met before. But hi, everyone. I've been to Poki booth. It was quite big. I was quite surprised. You know, I tried to convince people who are using Poki to also come on Instant Games, obviously, even though I'm not working on Instant Games anymore. And I do agree on the fact that people I talked to, they are looking for discoverability. And it's very hard on Steam and other platforms. I try to also get people interested in VR, but VR is another level of investment, right? You need the hardware. You need to do 3D. And not simple 3D, right? You need to invest into the entire kit. So I think like, for indie developers, or like single head developers, the web is very interesting. Also, as you mentioned Erik - we almost met each other, I saw you through a window, we shaked a hand, you were extremely busy, I'm so sad I couldn't meet you, spend more time with you - But what I hear here also is less and less people want to install stuff. That's true, they are bombarded... they are spammed sorry by ads all the time to download new games. I think something that is very good with web is that the frictionless experience where you can have an ad, click on it and be playing from that ad, and continue playing without having to install anything. I think that's something that we should actually promote more, because the frictionless experience is one of the key thing of web games, in my opinion, compared to every ad I see. Every time I am personally sent to the store, I don't download, because I don't want to go through that download experience. And also the login experience like when every single game asking me to register to their thing. When you're on Instant Game, and probably Poki as well, when you're logged in once, you're logged in everywhere. You have your your data already shared across all the games. When I say data, is that the developer can know the basic information about you without asking you to register to the game every single time. So there are lots of things that web is doing better now than than games installs, and I heard the story like from you Erik as well, and all other people.

Andrzej Mazur: Awesome! Who else was at GDC, and want to do a short intro?

Erik Dubbelboer: Well, right next to us was the, of course, the Godot booth, so Adam...

Adam Scott (Godot Engine): Yeah, why not? I can. I can take over there. Thanks for the introduction. Erik. So yeah, I was at the Godot booth. I'm currently... Fabio did the presentation last time that we presented to the gaming community. But in the meantime we switched roles. So he became part of the team as a normal member, and I took over as a web lead. So it was interesting to be at the GDC for web purposes, to know what's happening with the web platform, and I was astonished by how the web has grown... the growth of web like, and the needs of web during... Before I was looking at web games as just another way to export the game, and then, with all the caveats of like until recently, like until now, we don't have a threadless export, it will be included in the next release that will come out super soon. But I really thought that web was just another way to ship a game, and there was some caveats that you have to live with it, but with the the advent of Instant Games, and Poki, and other other platforms that permit you to play instantly, there were other big names that were super interested to add that frictionless experience, just like Youtube gaming and such. So it was super interesting to know, there's such a demand for games that run as soon as possible. It's super interesting to have that perspective, and really it blew up my my mind, and I was super glad, just for the web, to be there at the GDC because I have now my project filled with stuff and ideas to how to improve the engine and make the engine work better for the web. So I've been busy like for for the last weeks thinking about this. Great experience! Godot was there, thanks to W4. And Fabio isn't lead for the web, not because he's not doing the job, but because he's too much like busy at W4 to be available for the web. He's already leading the networking team at Godot. So I took over. Because I know really well in the web platform. Great stuff from the GDC in terms of web games, really!

Andrzej Mazur: Awesome. Thank you. Who else was at GDC.

Erik Dubbelboer: Björn?

Björn Ritzl: Yes, I was there. We were there, 3 of us, representing Defold. We were part of the Poki booth for most of the time, invited there as partners. We recently partnered with Poki with the purpose of having an even tighter integration with Poki, and focusing more on our backlog of HTML5 tasks to improve the engine even further for the web. One thing that surprised me is that still a lot of people come by the Poki booth and know nothing about web games and thought that it's not the thing anymore. It was back in the Flash days when they last played a game in the browser. And when people sat down and actually played the games that were on the screens there, they were really surprised, first of all by the performance, also by the quality of the games. And then when told to: Hey, just bring up your iphone and go to Poki.com and and try the game". They were also really surprised that the games were running super well on a phone. That's a takeaway that a lot of people still don't realize that playing web games on a phone or in your browser can be a really good and nice experience. There was one guy that came by, and he was like Oh, these games! They look like they're games for kids. But okay, I'll try one". And then he was sitting there playing for 15 min without saying a thing just, like sucked into one of the games. That was fun! And unfortunately I didn't get the chance to go by the Discord booth, because that was a big one, and they are now pushing for web games integrated into the Discord client somehow. I haven't really invested any time in that yet, so I'd be curious if anyone went by and talked to the Discord people, or if someone has done experiments, I think Richard might have some...

Richard Davey: We have.

Björn Ritzl: experience there with Phaser games. Yep.

Richard Davey: I can talk about that if you want quickly.

Andrzej Mazur: Yeah, absolutely.

Richard Davey: Sure. Yeah. So Discord basically opened up. It's not exceedingly straightforward. The routes to get into a game within a Discord channel. It's still all linked into voice channels. But you can go into a voice channel and join an activity. And the activity can basically launch, effectively an iframe. And the iframe can have your web game running in it. And then they produce an SDK, which allows you to then hook back out into the Channel, so you can create events that trigger off various things within the Channel with other players, or with other people in the Discord. You can like check people's roles and give them roles and all that kind of stuff. And it's also hooked into the voice chat as well. It's still very, very much hooked around the social voice, chat, element of Discord. It's not like... You don't just go into a channel and hit like a slash command and launch a bar or anything. It all takes place in there but I still think it's going to be massive. We've done 2 tests: a single player game and a multiplayer game. And that it's still under beta. You can only launch your games onto channels with a maximum of 20 users at the moment. But as soon as they lift that restriction, it's just gonna blow the doors off it. Really, I think I've seen so many people releasing games. They've released like a sort of funding program. And I've seen people making games that they've been putting up for funding. Just this is just that way of kicking things off. So with the team, they're great, really responsive. Been talking to them a lot. I think they were with anyone that was here who is doing any game to have a chat to our engine devs. I think it's gonna be huge, because again, discoverability and Discord's massive captive audience.

Andrzej Mazur: There are so many developers and players on Discord that this a potential new platform for web games. So that might be interesting to see how that evolves. Okay, anyone else at was at the GDC? That would like to say something?

Erik Dubbelboer: I'm kind of interested in here to hear Rafael's opinion. You were at a big talk with Unity together. I thought it was a big audience, which also definitely showed interest in web. And I don't know how many years CrazyGames has had a presence at

Rafael: GDC,

Erik Dubbelboer: I think you know best what's happening.

Rafael: CrazyGames, I think that was the second year for them. I was there both years. As I mentioned earlier, that was my eighth GDC. Lots have changed, I think, in the event. I think that a lot of it happens outside of this expo show, which is how I spend more than half of my time, actually running from one hotel to the other. My impression about the... At CrazyGames, we have already a lot of mobile publishers that we partner up with, and we brought them to the web. And so catching up with them, that was one of the things that we did. But we also met a bunch of cool new people. I think, for me, what was more interesting, and it was talking to a lot of big companies, I cannot name some of them, but a lot of them, and seeing that the amount of people joining the web space right now. More, and actually good hands, right? So we have a lot of quality stuff that are happening behind the scenes. As being a platform, it's nice, because you talk to publishers, you talk to game engines, yo talk to the service providers. So everybody's looking at it. Which is exciting. What's gonna happen in the next 6 months, I'm very excited about it. And I was part of the WebGL talk with community. The audience was sizable. That was nice. I think the personal highlight for me was that, when the talk was over, there were more people who wanted to talk to me than to Unity, which was nice. So that was nice. But really nice guys from community as well. And I think they spoke over that they are looking to it. They have a very sizable community, right? And a lot of content that is already done. Which I think it's interesting. Let's see, let's wait and see. It's been a while. I personally have been waiting for this. I work in the web developer space for 10 years now, I guess. What can happen? And overall, the show was good. I think it was smaller than the years before, most people that were there, a lot of business development. I think that San Francisco is a very expensive city. It's crazy how much money you spend just to be there. So it needs to justify the investment for a lot of companies. That's why I saw generally, even bigger publishers that will have one or 2 people where previous years, you would have looked at a bigger team over there. But yeah, I'm excited about it for us. It took me a month to follow up with everybody. So it was a good event. And you know, let's see what's happening at Games Point, I think. We'll be quite far already. Interesting to see. I think there is a lot of movements, and more content. Ultimately, I think that's what the web... The moment that we have the same quality of content that we have... that Mobile has or other platform have, then I think it's a no brainer for the players to decide where they are going to play. It's just easier to play on the web right? That's why I think Poki, CrazyGames, the game engines, everybody that's part of this place should be pushing the the things forward.

Andrzej Mazur: Absolutely! Awesome. I think we can move to the part that I'm interested in the most. How did you, Erik, how did Poki manage to get like 10 or 15 different studios? People getting into one space and have them present about web games? Could you tell us more about that?

Erik Dubbelboer: Okay, so Poki was there. We were at 12 employees from Poki, but we had 25 game developers who built games on Poki present there as well. Luckily I wasn't involved in organizing that. Booking flights, hotel, stuff like. Because it must have been crazy. But the team managed to do that. And that was great. I think it was nice to have actual game developers present there. Cause when I'm talking to someone that's interested in: hey, maybe I can convert my game to web game", I can do a sales pitch or whatever. I can talk a little bit about it. But it's much better if there's an actual game developer who already has a game on the web to show like, "Hey I'm actually doing this already. I'm making money out of this. This is what is possible. So it was super nice. One thing I wanted to... When Rafael, when you were talking, one thing I was thinking about. For me, it was really telling this year that, not specifically to GDC, but Unity, they had massive layoffs. I don't know. They fired like 1,500 people or something this year. And the web team was completely unaffected by that. I think that's mostly because of Noel, cause I know Unity got a lot of money from Facebook, the web team. But that's like definitely something where you see, like any other team at Unity is losing people, but the web team is growing and it's getting bigger because a lot more people are interested in it.

Andrzej Mazur: Awesome. Do we have any interesting stories, any of you, from this edition, from meeting with some people, or with developers who are not interested in the web and got hooked up, or by someone who returned from building games years ago. Noel?

Noel: I stopped by Poki's booth, waiting to talk to Erik, and while waiting, I had a very good coffee, and also I talked to a bunch of developers. Very young, I was surprised, around their twenties. Maybe, Erik, you will identify them. French people. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. But we spoke French. I asked them, how is it going? And they were... They didn't give me any number, but they looked very happy with how much money they are making. And I was like, you can find success, event as an indie developer. Apparently they make enough money to run their studio and be compensated fairly well. I don't know where they live in France. But I hear those stories and it makes me happy. I just wanted to share that experience. Another good story about Poki's booth!

Andrzej Mazur: I mean the fact that you, I mean... I hope that Poki will not go broke by getting so many people into GDC, it could be expensive. But I guess, if you did that's already a good sign that you can flex about it. And this shows that you can actually have a a good booth with web content, and some solid presence there. Adam, was the Godot booth. It was the first year for you, or maybe you did the booth earlier?

Adam Scott (Godot Engine): So. No, I think it's the second year for Godot being at the GDC. But it was my first year. Because yes, and maybe I'll repeat myself a little bit. But I'm the web lead since a few months. And really it changed my mind about web games. I really... The web platform is no stranger to me since a number of years, and I knew that web games were a thing but seeing the Poki booth, and other web games being showed. Seeing giants wanting to go in into the web platform. But because it's a no-brainer! For Youtube, or other even apps like Youtube, I think Linkedin wants to have games in their platform too. I think that what's interesting is that when you have the web platform at your disposal, you can just plumb games if you want. It includes, the web kit, not the Webkit engine, but the web kit when you have a web browser available. It gives you the possibility to load infinite amount of games quite rapidly. And they all wanted the instantaneous games and the frictionless that comes with web games. And not only that, but like seeing my by son Leon, my partner's son, that I showed you earlier, playing Poki games and playing online games, made me realize that there's a lot of people that would use that. It's not just like Oh, I can play games. I'll play on the web". No, no, no, there is content. There's possibility to really have a great experience of playing games on the web and it convinced me to work harder on the engine to mak sure that it's compatible for games. So I'm currently integrating... Godot 4, at the core of the engine, we're using software mixin. But it's super costly when using the single threaded, because of the COOP/COEP. The web and the cross origin isolation limitations of the web. If you want ads, or something like that, or third party access. When I created the threadless version of Godot for the web, there were web audio issues with our engine because all was software side. And that sync-ing module was really bad. I am beginning to include sample playing using web audio, and right now my prototype is going greatly, is going really well. I'm quite excited to be able to present this to to our developers soon. Because I'm feeling the pressure. I'm really feeling the pressure that we need to step up and make it so that people can use Godot, the engine to make games on the web too, because GDC made me realize that we need to be there. It's not just like 3 years ago, where there was a web build. And then you played. It was clunky but you could play the game. But ideally, you should download the game outside. But right now, you can play quite great quality games, and be addicted at a web game. So that's what I got from the GDC. Like my story.

Andrzej Mazur: That's awesome to hear. I could totally imagine seeing Discord, or LinkedIn, or other big players having just set up a computer, an arcade with some games. And that would be an interesting way to attract people. Coffee machine with good coffee, and the station with some true web games. That sounds like a perfect plan. Noel?

Noel: I stopped by the Godot booth as well, and I had the chance to talk to Fabio face to face for the first time. The guy was super excited about everything. You know. Fabio. He's always energetic. And the thing he was super excited to show me, and I'm surprised you didn't mention, is that you had a big Godot robot face all around the booth, and you could actually go to a computer and program it to animate it. And it was super fun. Adam, you didn't talk about that. Why not?

Adam Scott (Godot Engine): It was somebody that we invited, so I didn't have the opportunity to talk with them. So maybe that's why I didn't talk about it. But yeah, it was pretty impressive.

Erik Dubbelboer: One observation for me, about GDC, not games related. Like having a booth, there's so many people coming to your booth also just to get merch. Do you also have that, Adam and Rafael?

Adam Scott (Godot Engine): For us. Right we had the [missed]. And we had a ton of it. It was rather correct. But, like you, some merch. It was something!

Erik Dubbelboer: Yeah, we had socks and mugs and pens, and during the first day already, we had to hide them because people would just grab stuff and leave immediately, and

Noel: Have a similar story. I was at the Meta booth, obviously. And some people, they just come and say, Do you have any pins? Anything like pens? I'm like, you don't even have a question for me?". And yeah, and Erik, where's mine? I came to your booth, and I talked to everyone. Nobody gave me anything!

Erik Dubbelboer: But you came Friday just before it close. I think we were all out of stuff, like everything we brought was finished.

Noel: My bad.

Erik Dubbelboer: Another observation for me. I was kind of surprised, I thought. all of the crypto, whatever NFT stuff would be gone, and it would all be replaced by generative AI and stuff. But that wasn't that much the case. There was still a lot of crypto NFT stuff. Did anyone else expect the same thing where I thought it would all be generative AI by now, and was not?

Rafael: Where's the cryptoism? All the hype again? I actually expected the same. But it's a bubble. Whoever is working with Crypto. They can talk to the same people. I think sometimes you were able to talk to them. But I don't know. Feels like It's kind of like a different part of the industry with different mindset. Different players. Different content. It's a bit special. I mean.

Andrzej Mazur: There is a subset of, let's say, regular web 2.0 developers and, from those the subset of folks who actually try to go into web3. In the competitions, in the jams I organize, it's still... Let's say, there are 200 games submitted to the competition, and there will be like 10 actually trying to utilize some optional web3 challenges. It's still a small subset of folks. This still has a bad rep, I would say. For obvious reasons. There is a lot of scams out there, but there are genuine projects that's trying to do something cool for indie web game developers. I do hope there will be more focusing on the technology itself, and trying to not talk about all the scams in the space which do happen. But it's just, I think, a new technology. And that we will have such problems. But I think there is some hope for Web3, I would say, but you have to ignore all the noise, or the scam, and everything. But it's my personal opinion. I think the technology is interesting enough to play with it, if you're interested, it's not like you have to force that on anyone. I think those who optionally participate in those challenges benefit from that. Other folks can decide on their own if they are interested or not.

Erik Dubbelboer: I just see that, by the booths sizes, there's still money in it!

Andrzej Mazur: There is always money in it!

Richard Davey: That's a

Andrzej Mazur: good thing and a bad thing, I would say.

Erik Dubbelboer: Another interesting observation I had, is that the Unity Booth was... Like last year Unity had this huge booth, same as Epic, and this year Unity had the Creator lunch, which was just a bunch of couches, and that was it. That was interesting to me.

Adam Scott (Godot Engine): I think it's a PR move. Noel, you had an answer?

Erik Dubbelboer: Noel, you're muted.

Noel: I was saying, I think Richard is trying to speak.

Richard Davey: No, no, no, I'll speak up next. It's fine.

Noel: And also, Erik, you mentioned about generative AI. You said you expected generative AI, and you saw more a lot of cryptocurrency stuff. What did you see on generative AI? Because I saw only one, which was like you're in a game, and you just say, I wanna a sword that looks like this, and it will generate it for you. I thought it was like very cool thing to have. Unfortunately, the Wifi was completely broken at the event. So the generation took like 10 min. This was not demoable at all. But I would like to know what you've seen on generative AI.

Erik Dubbelboer: So don't get me started on the Wifi. We paid way too much for almost nothing. To be honest, I didn't see anything like. I barely had any time to walk around GDC. The time I spent walking around, I didn't see anything. I expected bigger booths because I thought there was money in there as well but, I don't know. Maybe next year.

Andrzej Mazur: All the companies were busy sitting at home and generating stuff through AI. Maybe.

Adam Scott (Godot Engine): Well, I wonder because, at the GDC need to preorder like your next year, maybe right away. So maybe the bubble, the AI bubble, was just beginning, and then no game project existed like last year. Maybe this year would be different. Next year will be different, because this year maybe there's more projects about this.

Erik Dubbelboer: Possibly.

Andrzej Mazur: It seems like many folks are working on different projects. And it still feels like this space can look totally different in a year from now. Seeing how often language models are released and how many new tools are appearing? I guess some of the product that were released this month or last month will stop to exist next year, but many will probably grow. It will be interesting to see how the ecosystem will look like next year. In the media, there is this panic that oh, my God! AI will take all the jobs!" But it's interesting to see that folks just switch focus on different tooling. And you will actually need more people to actually prepare all that, have the infrastructure, learn how to use those tools, etc. So I think for game developers, this will be just switching to a different set of tools instead of like Oh, my God, I'm gonna lose my job". I think it's just a matter of adjusting to different tooling and having people who never actually built any games before because they have no idea how to program, go into space, and maybe make some really cool games that will earn them a lot of money. And then they will just go full time because that makes sense for them. So I think the AI in making games is just a different tool that will help developers. New people create games. I hope there will be some some cool stories for next year.

Richard Davey: I have a quick question if it's alright. Probably best for Erik and Rafael. For the developers that came to your booths that have never made web games, for maybe they're like successful mobile developers, or console, or whatever. What's that biggest hangup with putting a game on the web, because obviously, it's a time investment. It requires a lot of effort. And how are they gonna get that money back, basically? What would you say is their kind of biggest questions around that?

Erik Dubbelboer: You wanna go first.

Rafael: You can go first.

Erik Dubbelboer: I go first. Okay? So the biggest hurdle I see is that a lot of them, for example, have Unity games. And of course, Unity has a web export, and that's fine. But what we usually see is that their game is completely not optimized on file size. So everything is way too big. And they they approach us like, Oh, yeah, we have a game. And it's like 200 MB. Only. That is just not gonna work on the web. The biggest issue is optimizing their game for web, basically. Because if you don't optimize your game for web, it's just not gonna work. Tools like Unity is not there yet. I know they're working on progressive loading and improving things and making it addressables easier. But it's just not there yet. So the main hurdle is investing the time in optimizing and build for the web. I would say.

Richard Davey: Are they still seeing it as a way to promote their games as opposed to a way to earn money from a game? You see what I mean like.

Erik Dubbelboer: Oh, yeah, that definitely still happens as well.

Richard Davey: Yeah, okay.

Erik Dubbelboer: But I think, Rafael, you maybe have more experience with that, because I'm more on the tech side. You're more on the...

Rafael: I mean, it's a very valid point that you say. Which generally, there's the business people and the tech people in the industry, righ? Generally, the business people will kind of say Yeah, we can do it", and then put in the tech people who will have to figure out how to. One of the main things that I see on the web, it's actually the distribution has been broken for quite some time. There is a bunch of websites with, as you knew websites how they were before. And there were no really, I would say. really high quality distribution places like Poki and CrazyGames are doing. Both companies are doing kind of like a place where developers feel the trust, you know. And that entails a bunch of different things. Obviously, a sizable community is one thing but you also want to have the tooling, right? They have their SDK, we have our SDK, but there's other stuff that actually is coming to life on the web. And this makes... I think you start building trust with this person, and you've been out for quite some time. You have all the tools, you have the community, and then it's just a matter of them seeing if the opportunity is good enough. Especially in crazy games, we put a lot of focus into that to make sure that everybody feels welcome, and have what they need. And I think that's what is changing as well. You start having some stable places where you can publish your game, and you're not left alone. I think that changed a lot in the past 2, 3 years, I think. That comes with more investment on Poki's side, on CrazyGames side, Discord now, or LinkedIn side as well, to make sure that this becomes a financial opportunity for them. Because ultimately, you can do games as a hobbies, as for passion. But you only go so far, but if you're really serious about in the end of the day, you wanna kind of live from it. And I think that's what also changes. And this means a lot to indie devs but even to bigger companies where they start seeing the value of it, and also understanding that there is money on it. The more money we can bring to the web, the better it will be. So that's also another thing. Which means there's more work to be done in several fronts as well.

Erik Dubbelboer: Yeah, one of the main questions you always get from mobile app developer, game developers, is how about in app purchases? So I think for CrazyGames, it's smart that you teamed up with Xsolla to make that possible, like in-app purchases. Everyone asks for that, because that's where a lot of them are making their money, and then when you tell them no, it's only... For Poki, at least, it's only ads, then they're like, Hmm, okay.

Rafael: Have you considered in-app purchases? Are you talking? Because, ultimately, obviously, it's a business decision. But I think the sort of content that you can have is just different, right? Because, it brings the real big, mobile game experiences. They make real money moving up, which is what we've got. I think that the content will also change.

Erik Dubbelboer: I'm not involved in that. I don't know if people within Poki are looking into that, that's not my area of expertise.

Andrzej Mazur: I mean it would be nice to see alternative options to adverts, obviously for privacy reasons, for many other reasons. There are different experiments. There was the Web Monetization API which kind of died, even though I was a huge enthusiast of it. But I think the fact that the web games, you can have them on your website, and that's it. And you just promote, you just send the link, that's a powerful thing, which is both a problem and a benefit in a way that... It's funny that people promote the web, saying that you can have the game anywhere, and you can promote it on your own. And then every single time from other folks I'm hearing okay, so where's the Steam for web games?"" And it's like, we want that freedom, but we also have that one big, biggest place where everybody goes, and that's the default place. Poki, CrazyGames are doing a great job at being that sort of that place in terms of the community, the tooling and everything else. But it's interesting to see folks actually like discussing this and being like, Yeah, I can put the games on my website. But like, where's the Steam of web games? Where are all the money? Where are all the folks? Where's the whole traffic?" It's interesting to see that this different approach to like trying to experiment with different models... but then getting back to just doing what Steam does. Awesome. Any other specific questions or comments? From anyone here?

Francois Daoust: One question that this triggers in my head is something we started to discuss some time ago. On the web, it's actually a feature that you want to preserve to have different Poki, CrazyGames, etc. different places where you can go and download web games because you don't want a centralized place. That's actually pretty good. But it may be then useful to think about interoperability of these different platforms in terms of: as a game developers, you may want to distribute your games on different platforms, and so there may be value in coordinating metadata around games that you need to provide when you distribute a game, to publish a game on Poki, on CrazyGames, on Instant Games, and possibly some APIs as well. I'm just wondering if it's something that we should continue to investigate or, actually, if it's something that you're not necessarily interested in because it touches on business, core business problems in your companies.

Andrzej Mazur: I'm gonna comment from the game developer point of view. Yes, we need to discuss that. Because then, if there is a unified way of putting a game somewhere, or communicating with a place to have the game, or some features. It's a lot lot easier. If I'm dealing with 10 different publishers, every single one will have different sdks, different APIs and you have to do all the adverts, all the things, different way, adjusting to specific requirements of the platform, which usually will, especially for new platforms, will constantly change anyway. So having a unified way of... specific ways of doing that would be very, very, very much appreciated.

Adam Scott (Godot Engine): Well, from a game engine perspective, too, it's interesting, because I was talking with Erik and other other well platforms and such web platforms, and I was telling them: if you want, you can always create an export option for Godot, for your platform specifically, that you can enter your parameters, and such when you're exporting for maybe that platform, but especially if there was like a web standard for like porting games, maybe it would be interesting for game purposes, like from a game engine side to be able to say: Hey, want to export to using that platform? That game web platform? Go ahead in a standard way, you can ship your game in a ZIP file to any web platform that wants to play your game.

Russell Kay (GameMaker): Yeah, that's something that we'd be interested in as well. Some standardization around common parameters, even some editable fields, or whatever that we could actually use for export. One of the things, sorry, kind of a comment from our side is that we're seeing a big uptake now on web cited submissions for game jams. We're seeing a lot of people are actually using GameMaker for a game jam. But then uploading the final content. I think that's a function of us going free on the HTML 5, and web browser on the export. So there lot more people of it. But we've seen a big uptake since Chirstman on game jams with the web export. Which I think is quite encouraging, because I've always been disappointed that we've not seen as much on the HTML5 side of things. That plus the WebAssembly. We're actually bringing our WebAssembly as an export. So it's not just the GX game side of things. So that's coming from us in the next couple of versions.

Adam Scott (Godot Engine): I just wanted to say that Godot is super used in game jams, and for the Web export is used a lot in game jams. Just wanted to approve like what Russell just said. It's super funny, even if Godot isn't right now the best way to export web games, but it's up all about like being able to play a jam quickly, like when you're rating your fellow game jam entries, the fact that you can play the game quickly and then evaluate it, and such, is super super useful for game jammers, because it really eases the friction. The frictionless quality of web games really is a big factor in game jams. Go ahead Erik!

Andrzej Mazur: I just gonna add one thing. Sorry, Erik. There are game jams specifically for web games. and it's worth promoting them, because they are doing great job promoting the web. That's it. Sorry, Erik. Go ahead.

Erik Dubbelboer: What I want to say is maybe we should try to get some more platforms on here because Poki, CrazyGames, but that's all. I don't know. Have we ever had anyone from Itch.io here? Or Y8, or Cool Math Games, or whatever. Any of the other platforms. Might be interesting to get all of them together and see if we can agree on some some stuff, maybe.

Andrzej Mazur: That sounds really cool.

Russell Kay (GameMaker): That'd be great. I could definitely get the GX games guys to come along. But they're small. You want big guys.

Rafael: Maybe do a call and just invite everybody or something. Everybody around the same table. And yeah. I think that's also the thing. The web is a bit fragmented, like the same pressure, I got. Some people think one thing, and then the others they're going to us. And then there's like the guys from Arkadium, They're also fairly big, doing their stuff. So it would be nice to have them as well. And then.

Erik Dubbelboer: Yeah.

Adam Scott (Godot Engine): Yeah, maybe that's to say, Hey, we want you here! Your feedback is appreciated. We're not like just a committee up in the clouds that exists by itself."

Andrzej Mazur: Yeah, absolutely! Awesome. We are almost reaching the hour. Thanks so much for all your input. It was really great hearing all the stories. I think the future for web games seems bright. It seems it's getting better with the next GDC. I can't wait to see how this will look next year already. Thanks again for participating. Thanks for commenting, sharing your stories, asking questions. And it's really great hearing from you. Any last words from anyone?

Adam Scott (Godot Engine): Long live the web!