Flash died and people assumed browser gaming died with it. What actually happened is that the technology moved to WebGL and WebAssembly, got faster than Flash ever was, and the distribution problem that killed mobile economics turned into the browser's biggest advantage.
The install step is the whole story
On mobile, every player costs money to acquire because every player has to be persuaded to download a 90 MB file, wait for it, grant permissions and open it. Most do not finish. The industry has a name for each stage of that loss and spends billions reducing it.
In the browser there is no download, no permission, no store page. A player clicks a link and is in the game. The funnel that mobile spends its entire budget fighting does not exist.
What else changed
- The privacy changes hurt mobile more. Web portals monetise their own traffic through their own placements, so the targeting collapse that broke mobile ad revenue hit them less directly.
- Portals need supply. CrazyGames, Poki, Yandex, GameDistribution and the rest compete for titles. A studio with a finished game is the scarce side of that market.
- Hardware caught up. A mid-range phone from 2021 runs WebGL content that would have been a desktop target a decade ago.
- Messaging and social platforms added game surfaces. Every one of them is a browser context, not an app store.
What it is not
It is not free money and it is not a one-click export. A Unity build aimed at mobile will usually not run on a mid-range Android browser without work — memory ceilings, build size and compression all have to be dealt with deliberately. The channel is real; the engineering is the price of entry.
This is what we do day to day — Unity to WebGL porting at Factorial Studio.
