No App Store Required

Architecture of the Next Wave

A two-person team shipped a game last fall that runs in any browser, is stunning, and plays on a phone. No download. No app store. Then the tools they used got a generation better, and almost nobody noticed.

Start with what's on screen. A cel-shaded planet running smoothly on a phone. Strangers moving through the same world in real time, synced over the network. Custom shaders for the water, the foliage, and the light. Text rendered by generating glyphs in WebAssembly so the GPU draws them sharply at any angle. They skipped Unity and Godot and built on top of Three.js and three-mesh-bvh. Everything else is theirs: controls, networking, backend.

That is a browser tab. A decade ago, this was a download and a loading bar. Now it is a link. This is the floor. The modern web stack renders real 3D on a phone, syncs players live, and asks nobody to install a thing. The hard parts, networking and pipelines, are still hard. But the web has mature building blocks for most of them, and you can usually find exactly what you need without having to carry an entire engine.

I became enamored of the promise of web games during the height of the social games craze, when I was at Zynga. A single codebase spanning client and server would have largely fixed what we kept fighting: the two drifting out of sync. I've chased that since, except for a 3-year AAA detour. I like how fast the ecosystem iterates compared to the decades I spent writing C++ and C#.

But here's the part almost nobody noticed. Their game runs on WebGL. The graphics API that the web has had for fifteen years. The old one. And a few weeks after their game shipped, the last domino fell. Safari added WebGPU, and with it, WebGPU went Baseline across every major browser.

WebGPU is not WebGL plus a version number. It is a different architecture, built for how GPUs actually work, and it unlocks compute shaders: general-purpose work running straight on the GPU. Particle systems, physics, fluid, procedural worlds, the things that used to crawl on the CPU now run an order of magnitude faster, sometimes two. Three.js made the switch already.

So this game is not the ceiling. It is the high-water mark of the stack we are about to leave behind. A team of two built this stunning world in a browser, and then the ground beneath it dropped within weeks. Most people haven't noticed. That's the opportunity, and the tip of the iceberg.