Ron Piovesan is the global lead for content acquisition for Mozilla

One meme that will happily be put to rest is if HTML5 can handle gaming.

The answer is a resounding “Yes”! Whether on desktop or mobile, HTML5 is now at a stage where it can support the most challenging game experiences.

Gamers are a notoriously demanding bunch. And that’s understandable. You don’t want any hiccups or stutter in gameplay when you’ve got compounds to storm, races to win, balloons to pop, and ropes to cut.

The latest proof that stuff’s getting real now is that developer Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 game engine has been ported to the web. This means it will be almost impossible to tell the difference between a native code game and a web game running on the browser. The same 3D graphics and immersive experience hard core gamers are used to can now be handily served up via a browser.

Browsers are getting better, too. The new OdinMonkey JavaScript engine shipping on upcoming versions of Firefox and has a performance boost of about 1,000 percent (yes, that is three zeros) over anything else out there. Now you’ve got JavaScript running lighting fast and providing a mind-blowing gaming experience right in the browser.

Want to see what a boost in performance can provide? Check out the future of web-based 3D gaming on the totally awesome (but goofily named … it wasn’t my idea) BannanaBread demo, an incredible 3D first-person shooter running on nothing but web technologies. And if you’re not into playing games by yourself, you can now have immersive multi-player action served up over the web via WebRTC.

But never mind the technology — let’s talk game experience. As EA’s Rich Hilleman points out in the video below, games are about magic and pushing the limits of imagination. One potential the web offers is the possibility of a single, contiguous gaming experience that carries with you wherever you go.

In a multidevice, multiplatform world, the consumer won’t accept playing their game in only one environment. As they move about their day, they’ll want to access their game, at the right state, on the device they have handy. The ubiquity of the web provides for that.

Also, by extending games to different devices and different form factors, the web helps open up gaming to the casual user, who is a great new customer for the gaming industry.

How else can the web help the gaming industry?

• Massive reach: It isn’t called the World Wide Web for nothing!
• Marketing and discoverability: Developers aren’t restricted to marketing a game in the confines of an app store. The expanse of the web and all of its inherent linkability and shareability are available so developers can reach new customers.
• Payments: People have been doing payments on the web for years. With the web, developers have the flexibility to charge what they want, and use the payment processer they want.
• Easy updates: The game is on your server. Developers can update when they want without having to bother with store approval processes.
• Easy analytics: Again, the game is on your server so you don’t have to wait for analytic reports from an app store, you get all the analytic information you need, in real time.
• Customer relationship: Distributing a game on the web means the developer has a direct relationship with the customer. Game developers don’t need to go through an app store or any other third party to manage payments or updates. You have a direct line to the customer. No one is in the middle.

But ultimately, as Chris Ye of Uken Games says in the below video, gaming is about spreading happiness. If a developer is getting the performance they need from the web (and we think they will), then HTML5 lets them spread happiness across multiple platforms without the unhappiness of needing to maintain and upgrade multiple code bases for multiple devices.

The web still has some work to do to live up to its full potential as the ultimate global game platform, but it is getting there. And realizing the benefits the web provides, the industry participation in building out a game ecosystem is closely tracking the improvements in web game performance. That’s a trend we’ll see across the game market.

Image source: Epic Games

Ron Piovesan leads business development for the Firefox Marketplace and is responsible for signing distribution deals with major content and games providers. His team has closed over 200 distribution deals and helped lead Mozilla’s first strategic equity investment. He also leads the content acquisition strategy for the new FirefoxOS phone in Brazil, in partnership with Telefonica. Prior to Mozilla, he was a marketing director with DataDirect Networks. Piovesan spent over seven years at Cisco. Piovesan lectures on marketing and social media strategies at Stanford University. He has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Carleton University in Canada; a master’s degree in media and communications from Goldsmiths College, U.K.; and an MBA from the joint program at the Columbia and UC Berkeley Haas GSB.

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The wait is over. Wikipedia now widely supports HTML 5 video content on its millions of entries with the launch of its TimeMediaHandler, soon with support for mobile.

Wikimedia has been working on getting video onto Wikipedia for nearly four years. It partnered with HTML 5 open source video platform Kaltura in 2008 and worked with others such as Google to create the TimeMediaHandler. The TimeMediaHandler is what makes video work on Wikis. It supports the audio, video, closed captioning, other “timed text,” and is very flexible. It changes based on your bandwidth and what kind of device you are on, including mobile.

In true Wikipedia fashion, you can contribute to and edit videos you add to the site as well. That is, you can add  your own translated subtitles and add closed caption versions in your language. It represents a pretty big opportunity to expand the library of videos translated for the hearing impaired.

Full editing capabilities and mobile support are not yet deployed, however.

Of course, Wikipedia has had to do a lot of beefing up to prepare for the video. It had to ensure there was enough space to store all of the content. It also had to ensure that the process of uploading videos was an easy and quick one — otherwise no one would do it. The Wikimedia Foundation created an Upload Wizard between 2010 and 2011 to help people with just that.

The TimeMediaHandler supports open source video format WebM — a type of video that is built specifically for the web and is made to conform to your device and bandwidth. Popular players such as YouTube use WebM, which means you can pull free-licensed content from YouTube’s library to supplement Wikipedia entries.

Cat film image via Shutterstock

Wooga (pronounced “voo-ga”) came out of nowhere as a major force in social games. Now we’ll see if the company can reproduce some of that magic in mobile games. This crossover strategy is the same kind of move that rivals like Zynga and King.com are making. Those who execute this transition strategy well will be on the top of the game industry, and those who fail…. We won’t say, but Wooga’s chief executive, Jens Begemann (pictured), has plenty to talk about.

He cofounded the Berlin, Germany-based company in 2009 with Philipp Moeser and Patrick Paulisch with the goal of making games for everyone. Now it’s the fourth-largest social game publisher on Facebook, with more than 38.6 million monthly active users according to AppData.

The company has created addictive, simple, and high-quality games, such as Bubble Island, Brain Buddies, Monster World, Happy Hospital, Magic Land, and Diamond Dash. With that portfolio, the developer has grown to more than 200 employees and raised $24 million in venture capital. The company’s mobile version of Diamond Dash alone has had more than 20 million downloads.

We caught up with Begemann at the Casual Connect game conference in Seattle. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: How would you describe the last year and the games you have made?

Jens Begemann: A year ago, we decided that mobile would be a very, very important part of our strategy, and that in addition to the PC games on Facebook, we should also try to make mobile games social. Because I think if you look at the biggest successes on mobile — the biggest mobile games — they all have been single-player, even though these devices are really communication devices. We believe all mobile games should be social. So one year ago, we started investing a lot. Now we’re a bit over 200 employees, and half of them work on mobile games. We made quite a big shift. We continue to invest in our PC games on Facebook, but mobile is extremely important to us now.

GamesBeat: Is the mobile game market catching up with the level of Facebook interaction, in terms of the number of mobile game users or how much they play games? 

Begemann: Facebook is now so huge that virtually everybody uses it on their PC. There are very few people left who don’t. On mobile and smartphones, and especially on tablets, we see a super-strong growth in users. While on Facebook, revenues are still growing, but user numbers not so much. [The number of] Facebook users on mobile is growing insanely. That’s what we try to take advantage of: more and more mobile users using Facebook to be social on mobile.

GamesBeat: Did a lot of your mobile activity also coincide with Facebook growing on mobile?

Begemann: We don’t have exact data on the usage of Facebook’s mobile app. There is some public information, but we don’t know the exact details on that. We feel that the growth we have is because there are more devices. Facebook on mobile is growing. People want social games on mobile. That’s what we do now.

GamesBeat: There were some interesting comments recently. At E3, Naoki Aoyagi from Gree International said that this whole mobile game dominance would be settled in the next 18 months or so. That’s why they’ve decided they want to spend so much money now. Mark Pincus responded to that and said, “I don’t think the market is quite ready because there’s so much more scale on Facebook.” You launch something, and pretty regularly they can make it to 10 million users in 90 days. If you invest, say, 10 million bucks, you can expect to get 50 million dollars in return. He says that they’re still waiting for that return rate to enable that on mobile. You may invest in mobile now, but you’re not going to get that return rate. It’s an interesting contrast.

Begemann: We’re extremely happy. Diamond Dash, which we launched in December for iPhone and iPad, went way beyond our expectations. We had 20 million downloads without spending money on advertising. That was all organic, but still millions of downloads every month and way beyond our expectations. I think what helped there was that the game is really cross-platform, right? In the morning you can play on the iPhone. At your lunch break you can play on your PC, and in the evening on your iPad. It takes your account from device to device. And you compete with your friends. That’s also extremely important. It’s a social game. On these devices — on the Android, like the Galaxy S3 and the Nexus 7 — it’s coming…in a few months. We’re still in development. But we’re excited to be on more platforms.

GamesBeat: Where do you think the line is right now for you as far as investing in mobile versus not trying to go too far ahead of the market?

Begemann: For us today, the importance is equal. We continue to hire super-fast; we grow by at least two employees every week. Half of them work on games for Facebook and Flash games for Facebook on the PC, and half on mobile. So for us it’s really 50/50. I can’t speak for others, but for us they have equal importance. I think that will also be reflected in user numbers and revenues very soon.

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Eric Kay, engineering manager at Google

Google announced on Thursday that its “native client” technology is ready, and it will allow game developers to get heavy-duty games to run in web browsers.

This video with one of Google’s technical gurus gives a full explanation of the significance of this technology. In essence, native client has turned web games played on the Chrome browser into a high-end gaming platform.

Square Enix and a a bunch of other game companies showed their support for the effort and demonstrated games with 3D graphics running in the Google Chrome browser. Native-client games will be able to take full advantage of multicore microprocessors, whereas most web content today can’t.

Eric Kay (pictured right), engineering manager at Google on the native client project, said that native client games will be able to reach a much wider audience of users who play games in browsers but don’t want to buy game consoles or invest in expensive gamer PC hardware. Chrome has 200 million users now.

Kay said the benefits of running a game natively in the Chrome browser is high performance, security, and the ability to port older games to the system easily. Developers can use a variety of familiar programming tools.

The Unity 3D game engine will now include a check box that a developer can click in order to make a Unity-based game run on the Chrome browser. That’s pretty darn simple. It means developers don’t have to waste a lot of time rewriting games and other apps for the web, only to see them crawl in slow motion. Besides games, photo and video apps will also benefit from the native client technology.

Here’s our video of Eric Kay below.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Sencha, provider of HTML 5 tools for web and mobile developers, received $15 million in a second round of funding led by Jafco Ventures.

HTML 5 applications can make beautiful, interactive experiences on PCs and mobile devices. But there are some drawbacks to using HTML 5 that have held the marketplace from rushing the field. These apps are unable to connect to a device’s own native apps and data. For example, an HTML5 app running on an iPhone wouldn’t be able to access the camera or address book, because those live within the mobile operating system, which HTML 5 exists apart from. But, aside from these drawbacks, there are many pros to developing with it

“The future is a multi-device world,” said Michael Mullany, chief executive of Sencha, in an interview with VentureBeat. “The web is really the only platform that can span [many different devices] … you’re not going to have a native platform that is going to talk to all of those.”

Mullany feels it would be an arduous task to creative native applications with the same user experience across multiple operating systems and devices. Because HTML 5 apps are web-based, they can provide a cohesive experience across those devices, including your tablet, phone, computer and even television.

“People are going to expect that user experiences across these devices will be shared experiences,” he said.

In addition to delivering on this expectation, Sencha plans to use the funding for more product announcements, small technology acquisitions and expanding developers’ abilities. In fact, the company announced a new cloud product yesterday, Sencha.io, which allows developers to create HTML 5 web apps without having to deal with sever-side coding and hosting their web app.

Sencha is located in Redwood City, Calif. and was founded in 2010. The company received a $14 million first round of funding led by Sequoia Capital in June 2010. Both Sequoia Capital and Radar Partners participated in this round.

Today at DEMO, MashON is releasing a beta version of a new “shop in a box” tool called Dabble, which can be quickly integrated into any web shop including those running on mobile and tablet platforms.

MashON started in 2005 with a product called Comic Book Creator, which allowed people to manufacture their own comic books using licensed intellectual property (IP). Now MashON has over 350 products that can carry your brand, including clothing, home decor, kitchen and sports equipment. Shoppers can customize the available products by selecting colors, images and other options. MashON manufactures and ships the products on demand.

Dabble is a HTML 5 plugin that’s embedded into an existing web store to allow shoppers to customize products. The store owner selects the products and customization options such as colors and images using an administration dashboard.

Dabble’s cart adaptor interacts with your native cart (currently Magento, with Shopify, DemandWare and Yahoo adaptors to follow) so that all transactions are processed entirely within the store. Once shoppers start to order, Dabble handles the manufacturing and shipping. During its beta period, MashON won’t charge a subscription fee for Dabble.

The main advantage for customers is that they don’t have to manufacture, warehouse or ship merchandise, and they can integrate Dabble into an existing store. MashON claims that competitors like Cafe Press and Zazzle require shoppers to come to their stores to buy rather than integrating into the brand’s store. Another competitor, Spreadshirt, pointed out that this is not true of their product. Typical customers are TV studios, music artists, sports celebrities and toy companies and already include MGM Studios, The Jim Henson Company and Penguin Publishing.

MashON was founded in 2005, is based in Los Angeles, is privately funded and has 28 employees.

MashON is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.