Epic boss predicts AAA games will run in browsers "in another few years"
Tim Sweeney believes the industry is growing to embrace platform-agnostic development, and predicted a future where gamers can run any game in a browser.
"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 Epic CEO told Gamasutra.
This isn't science fiction; Epic already has its own Unreal Engine 3 running in browsers thanks to Adobe Flash.
"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," he said.
Sweeney hopes to eliminate the middle man.
"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," he said.
"In another few years, I think that's going to be a very realistic scenario. And so the web will generally be a platform, and you can have a real application with a full feature set that runs within a web browser."