Browser games have been around for a long time, but lately we have seen traditionally PC titles like Command and Conquer or even the famous Counter-Strike 1.6 also available on this platform. How can this be possible if at the time they had certain hardware requirements ?
A game like Counter-Strike 1.6 needed a PC with a Pentium 4 3 GHz processor, 1 GB of RAM and a graphics card that supports DirectX 9. For its part, another game like Command and Conquer (following the two examples we have put ), required an 800 MHz Pentium III, with 128 MB of RAM and a DirectX 8.1 compatible graphics card and 32 MB of VRAM.
Browser-based games also require hardware
We start from the basis that a Pentium 4 is a processor launched in the year 2000, and that even the lowest-end processors that exist today multiply its power by several integers (let’s not talk about a Pentium III anymore). And the reality is that browser games still use the hardware resources of the PC , but these therefore exceed the requirements of the games that are playable, which is hardly remarkable, and therefore they do not publish the requirements as such because literally any PC ( and even smartphone) has plenty of hardware power to run them smoothly.
An example is found, as we said, in Counter-Strike 1.6 , which is now playable in the browser.
Initially, browser games were possible thanks to SVG, Canvas and WebGL technologies, but since 2010 these were replaced by so-called plugins, in this case the famous Flash and Java , but also Shockwave , Silverlight and Unity Web Player . And as you will already suppose, these plugins also use the hardware resources of the computer in which they are run to be able to service the requirements of the games.
The future of browser games
Of course, since 2017 most companies (or at least the most representative, such as Oracle with its Java plugin or Adobe with Flash Player) decided to stop supporting their systems (for example, Adobe has already announced that Flash will disappear from browsers in December 2020), so the creators of browser games will have to opt for other technologies, as you will already suppose HTML5 is the most powerful given its enormous possibilities.
And of course, here we are already climbing the ladder because HTML5 has hardware requirements similar to what some games would have: ask for at least a Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon at 2 GHz, 2 GB of RAM and 1 GB of available disk space between other things. Obviously these are minimum requirements, and the reality is that the browser games of tomorrow will have certain hardware requirements in the same way that current PC games have.
The good part is that both the Unreal and Unity engines, widely used in video games, can be exploited to WebGL to work in browsers without the need for any plugin, although it is true that they depend too much on the browser to provide a satisfactory gaming experience (You know, download times for what the game occupies, maximum FPS, etc.). On the other hand, other engines like Phaser and PlayCanvas are native to HTML5 browsers and provide a better gaming experience, although graphically they are inferior.
What future holds for this type of games?
Adapt or die. With the main companies that maintain current plugins such as Flash or Java abandoning their support, browser games must adopt some of the new technologies, and as we have explained, they inevitably go through HTML5.
Nowadays, any PC on the market, including the lowest-end and low-consumption ones, has enough power to run HTML5 and that means that this type of game has a lot of potential , a kind of streaming game but that uses the browser in its instead (in fact, with Google Stadia it is already done literally if you want to play on PC, since it works using the Chrome browser).
Will there be a time when we see triple-A games running in the browser? It is quite complicated because the developers of the games are not interested, but by proxy, of course it will be viable.