Humble Mozilla Bundle pushes WebGL-powered browser gaming

Since its successful launch back in 2010, the Humble Bundle pay-what-you-want-for-indie-PC-games distribution service has expanded to include AAA games, Android games, music, and even eBooks. Now, the service is expanding in another new direction with the Humble Mozilla Bundle, focused exclusively on games that can be played in any WebGL-compatible browser. For the next two weeks, users can pay what they want for access to DRM-free versions of Super Hexagon, Aaaaa! for the Awesome, Osmos, Zen bound 2, and Dustforce DX. Contributing over certain thresholds adds access to Voxatron, FTL: Advanced Edition, and Democracy 3.

While most of the games can also be redeemed on Steam or downloaded directly (and DRM-free) for Windows, Mac, or Linux, the gimmick here is that all eight titles can all be played in a modern WebGL-compliant browser like Chrome or Firefox (other browsers may work, but they aren’t guaranteed to be supported by the Humble Bundle folks). To prove the concept, you can play limited demos of each title right now on HumbleBundle.com, without having to download any executables, plug-ins, storefronts, or game managers (you can also expand to full screen, of course). Just a quick data download in an embedded HTML5 object is all you need to play the game locally, not streamed from a remote server as is the case with some other in-browser gaming “solutions.”

While many users no doubt still think of browser-based gaming as the province of bulky, 2D Flash games with huge processor overhead, that impression is pretty outdated at this point. Using HTML5 and WebGL standards and optimized coding subsets like asm.js, developers can now approach native executable performance while still taking advantage of the cross-platform compatibility of a browser window. Epic’s in-browser Unreal Engine 4 demos and the Unity engine’s addition of browser support earlier this year proved that concept quite well, and now the Humble Bundle is going further to prove it as a viable model for distributing actual games.

While none of the games in the Humble Bundle are going to give Crysis 3 a run for its money, seeing decently robust 3D games like Zen Bound or Aaaaa! running in an unmodified Web browser is still a pretty weird experience. As of this writing, over 6,200 customers have paid over $28,000 for the package, so it seems like a weird experience that many people are willing to support, at least.