The potential of games to run in any browser, anywhere, has been a dream for many years in the gaming industry. What if there were no massive downloads, finicky installation procedures, or demanding ports to different platforms? Developers could have an unparalleled reach for their games if anyone could play it just by going to the right web address.

Of course, the practical difficulties to implementing this dream were massive. The performance of browsers would mean that few games beyond a simple solitaire would be playable, and where’s the market for that these days? Fortunately, many people have been hard at work finding solutions, and the advent of the new WebGL announced earlier this year promised near-native speeds for browser-based games. Still, we’d have to see all the major browsers support that, and then more work on the part of game developers. And even if all the technical problems were solved, how would potential players find out about this?

 

Enter Mozilla, acting in concert with Humble Bundle, offering a package of indie games that will run right in your Firefox or other WebGL compliant browser (including Chrome) on Windows, Mac and Linux. The Humble Mozilla Bundle is powered by asm.js, and gamers can pay what they want, support non-profit organizations and seamlessly play games right in their browser.

If you haven’t been following the amazing success of the Humble Bundle, the site started as a way to generate some sales for indie game developers as well as raise money for charity by offering a bundle of games for a price picked by the buyer. The buyer can also pick the charity being supported, and vary the ratio of how the money is allocated between developers and charity. The concept proved to be a viral marketing smash, and continues today with bundles every couple of weeks, now having extended into multiple platforms and even other product categories. The Humble Bundle has raised well over $50 million in its four years, with over $20 million to charity.

As a marketing tool, the Humble Bundle has been a terrific way for indie developers to get exposure for games and generate some added sales. Now the technology is making it even easier to play these games. The [a]listdaily spoke with Humble co-founder John Graham and Mozilla director of product management Bill Maggs about the Humble Mozilla Bundle and what it portends for games.

[a]listdaily: Tell me about what the Humble Mozilla Bundle accomplishes.

John Graham: We are now able to take eight awesome indie games into the browser and make them playable right there. We’ve always wondered when that time would come. For other types of media, you just go there and the browser just handles it. You’re viewing or listening or watching right there. For gaming there’s been no real precedent for that, not when it comes to hardcore, accelerated PC gaming. This is an opportunity to really bring that same ease of use and make playing a game as easy as watching a video. That’s what gets us really excited. Mozilla has been working really hard creating the asm.js library that’s really making it all possible, so games can be recompiled for this system and run really nicely at near-native speeds right in the browser.

Bill Maggs: Mozilla has wanted to do this for a long time, the technology base has been coming together, and now WebGl is running everywhere, even on iOS 8. That’s a really important step. Now we can take the code that developers write in C++ and compile it directly into Javascript that runs in every browser, but is optimized to run in Firefox as well as other major browsers. It makes for the first-class hardware -accelerated experience that gamers really want.

[a]listdaily: The promise of WebGL is finally being delivered, isn’t it?

John Graham: We’re certainly excited about it, and this is only the beginning. We wanted to create that base level, and evangelize that base level of customer experience where you show up and you’re playing games in the browser, but there’s a whole wealth of features that’ll be very exciting for the future. In the future, the same way a video knows which device is accessing it across computers and types of hardware, to do things like detect resolution and give you what you want, there’s no reason games couldn’t do that to.

[a]listdaily: Potentially, then, you could have a game that’s playable on mobile platforms as well as PC by detecting the platform and changing the controls available, couldn’t you?

Bill Maggs: One thing that Humble has done that’s really pretty good is they’ve worked with a lot of their developers to get a standard approach that works for PC games that essentially abstracts the hardware in a pretty standard way. There are projects under way that we’ve done at Mozilla to make it possible for anybody with a game controller to just plug that controller into their computer and just have it work. A lot of these controllers are popular on console, it would be neat to have them usable in your browser too.

[a]listdaily: What are developers looking forward to with this technology and the Humble Bundle?

John Graham: We’ve found in the past when we do something new that shakes up the model a little bit, we tend to generate a lot of natural buzz around the promotion that we’re doing, and that’s something developers are interested in. We’ve built up some good will in general around cultivating new platforms. We’ve got nearly 100 games ported to Linux now, but this is a frontier that’s kind of like Linux but even larger in terms of the potential and ease of access for everybody. It really feels like the precipice is something huge, when you think about how many people really use a browser versus what really big user bases there are in the industry. Browsers are just so much bigger. We’re talking hundreds of millions of users, maybe billions versus less than a hundred million Steam users. How many of these would be gamers that would get into all this beautiful content that’s out there but just haven’t wanted to deal with the existing ecosystem

Bill Maggs: The technology is there, and innovative companies like Humble Bundle have figured out ways to build viral marketing events around great content that people just literally didn’t know was available for PC. We thought, what a great opportunity to take every single person who opens a home page on a browser to be able to identify what part of this big audience out there wants to play games this way. We thought it would be a novel idea to take one of the game developers in this bundle to make a playable game for us that we can put in the snippet. The entire 3D game, with all the assets and everything, only takes up 180K. When it comes out we think a lot of people will be blown away by it.