14 DAY TRIAL // The leader of Epic Games, one of the video game developers who are always aiming to push the limits of current technology, believes that in a few years players will be able to use their browser to play any video game developed for home consoles or mobile platforms.
Tim Sweeney, who is the chief executive officer of Epic Games, has told Gamasutra that, “We're slowly heading in that direction as an industry. You should be able to take any game - a PlayStation 3 or iOS game, for example - and just go to that and play it from any web browser.”
The executive believes that Adobe, via its Flash product, will allow many titles to be ported to a variety of gaming-ready devices.
He added, “You give it any C++ program, like Unreal Engine 3, and it translates it to a platform-independent application that can run within Flash, within any web browser or on any platform where Flash runs. That's an awesome breakthrough; it shows you the possibilities.
“I think the next step in that is cross-compiling games from C++ or whatever and directly running them as native HTML5 and JavaScript applications within any standard web browser.”
In theory video games can already use browsers to run, but there are problems with the implementation of HTML 5 and JavaScript that tend to lead to crashes and problems when it comes to performance.
Epic Games has found significant success on consoles lately, with the Gears of War series, but the company seems to believe that the PC will once again become the focus on gaming in the coming years.
The development team has already revealed a tech demo, called Samaritan, for the Unreal Engine 4 and the company plans to wait for the next home consoles from both Sony and Microsoft before officially introducing it.