I get to know the best games from my 13-year-old daughter. Personally I mostly prefer uncool niche video games, but I get very excited when I learn about a game, that is played by every second kid in the neighbourhood, because these are the games that sometimes lead to dramatic changes in the industry.
From the genre, visual or gameplay perspectives these games are often not mainstream. They’re not of the extremely popular MMO or first person shooter type. Visually they are very indie, but nevertheless, or maybe even because of that, capture the minds of kids. Usually, traditional video game press and websites learn about these games much later, only after they’ve reached the level of popularity, that can’t be ignored any more.
Five Nights at Freddy’s (or FNAF to be short) was the first such game that I learned about from my kid, then there was Baldi’s Basics in Education and Learning (please, google what it looks like, I bet you’ll be surprised) and in the past year she played a lot of FRIDAY NIGHT FUNKIN'.
The case of FRIDAY NIGHT FUNKIN’ (that today is pretty well known in the industry) is so impressive that a new term has been invented to describe and distinguish modern web games from the old ones, that were somewhat similar, but made in Flash, rather than modern web technologies.
An instant game is a game that can be played without a need to first download or install it, accessible on any device through a web browser, basically instantly available and playable via an ordinary web hyperlink. One could say the description more or less covers Flash games, social games of the pre-smartphone era and even has some hypercasual vibes in it.
But why now? Well, because of the FRIDAY NIGHT FUNKIN’ and it’s success story. Plus web technologies have matured enough: WebGL, fast CDN availability, video game engines with export for the Web, and a huge sea of available assets for creators.
And what’s more important, the world around us is finally ready to value games that are available just via a link. Video game streamers and tiktokers will definitely figure out how to entertain their audience with games that are accessible for everyone with a single click. Messenger apps, Reddit and Discord will help with the distribution and kill the need to deal with app stores.
One could imagine that the unique capabilities of indie games will allow not only web ports of current titles, but completely new experiences that will be build on the core values of the web platform: accessibility, multiplayer-first, linkable not only the game itself, but the in-game and player content specifically, so that anyone can share an instantly viewable race replay with a call to action to beat it or a homebase in an open world game, that they’ve put dozens of hours into.
It very well may be that we’ll also see new kinds of web video game showcases, which were numerous and popular back in the days. Though, if I had to guess, I’d bet that messenger apps would be a great fit for game discovery and social tools that are always needed for any kind of healthy video game ecosystem.
As you may have noticed, I am a believer in this possible future and would like to be part of it. Looking forward to the next game I’ll learn about from my kid.