The Future of Games is an Instant Flash to the past
Author here!<p>Couple of things -- despite the admittedly click-baity headline, I&#x27;m not 100% convinced that &quot;instant games&quot; are definitely the future. Nobody can predict the future with certainty. And as I state up front in the article FNF itself is obviously an outlier which should not serve as a model to try to replicate step by step.<p>My main point is that instant games -- which is to say browser games -- are actually already the past and the present (even if they&#x27;re not necessarily taking over everything else just yet), and most people are unfamiliar with a bunch of weird details about how they began in the first place.<p>The article&#x27;s actual thesis is not necessarily to prove to you that instant games are the &quot;wave of the future&quot; but to point out:<p>1) Even games industry insiders are often massively out of touch with trends<p>2) Browsers games represent the <i>potential</i> to disrupt existing gatekeepers and platforms<p>3) Browser games had a weird and unique ecosystem that represented a &#x27;minor league&#x27; of games that provided an on-ramp to further professional success, <i>especially</i> for international developers, and we&#x27;ve largely lost that today<p>4) Modern platforms want to own the entire stack top to bottom (editing tools, playback engine, discovery, and marketplace), but trying to capture so much value yourself and tightly controlling the environment can actually stunt the ecosystem<p>And yeah the article is really long. I&#x27;m chronically unable to write short articles when I have a lot to say and that means I&#x27;m taking the sincere risk of boring some of you to death while you wait for me to get to the point, sorry about that!