The thing is it's not that hard to write cross-platform games. Compatibility layers like SDL2 make it easy to target a platform agnostic system interface. Vulkan enables high performance graphics on most platforms.
Just out of curiosity, do you speak out of first hand experience, that it is not hard?
When you sell a game, people expect it to just run. Windows only games have already countless bugs, making it impossible to start for quite some people. Now add to that Android (with all its different versions and vendor specific implementations) Apple with a slightly different ecosystem .. and then Linux Desktops.
Lets just say, that I am making a game. Even open source. And I want cross-platform, but don't want to get mad along the way and I want to focus on the gameplay and not platform specific code. (and did not want to use unity for various reasons)
> And I want cross-platform, but don't want to get mad along the way and I want to focus on the gameplay and not platform specific code. (and did not want to use unity for various reasons)
Which platform specific code? With a compatibility layer and a cross-platform graphics API we're talking about a vanishingly small amount of code.
"Which platform specific code? With a compatibility layer and a cross-platform graphics API we're talking about a vanishingly small amount of code."
Again, do you have really first hand experience, how "vanishingly small" that amount of code is?
I have not much experience in that area, as I specialiced on the web years ago, BECAUSE I heard too much horror stories about the difference in "theoretically cross plattform" and reality.
I have not released a commercial product, but I have worked quite prolifically with these tools and the experience is very good.
Web is an interesting value proposition because somebody else is worrying about portability, but it's quite limiting isn't it? I mean you're limited to webGL and a single-threaded host environment. It's certainly possible to make some nice experiences within those limitations, but you're not getting anywhere close to the full capacity of a user's hardware.
Good luck, if you do. I am serious. I also think the waste of the millions of layers of the web to the hardware disturbing, but it is the best compromise I see.
"but you're not getting anywhere close to the full capacity of a user's hardware. "
Certainly not. So no, doing a graphical bombastic AAA game is not possible, but the vast majority of games is today quite doable on the web.
"a single-threaded host environment"
And fortunately today this is not true anymore. With web workers and various other approaches, you can have costly calculations in the background, but sure, this is still not the same as real multi-threading.
