Facebook Pushes HTML5 Among Game Developers — A Key Part of Mobile Strategy
Facebook’s Cory Ondrejka, who recently joined the company last fall as part of the Walletin acquisition, appears to be stepping up as the platform’s advocate of HTML5 — a central piece of the company’s mobile strategy going forward. If developers adopt HTML5 over building native iOS or Android apps, it will be easier for the company to sidestep relatively closed intermediaries like Apple when it wants to roll out new platform functionality or bring products like Credits to mobile games.
Ondrejka is giving a talk tonight about game performance with HTML5. During a recent hackathon, he and others developed JSGameBench — a way of helping developers understand how they can create games that are as slick as native apps on HTML5. The program draws moving, animated sprites as fast as possible at 30 frames per second against a background with both axis-aligned and rotated sprites.
Facebook used JSGameBench to test browser performance at drawing the sprites — Microsoft’s Internet Explore 9 came out on top followed by Google’s Chrome 10, with more than 1,000 sprites per frame. Ondrejka said that 50 sprites per frame is generally the lowest amount needed for good game performance.
Right now, Facebook has weak penetration among top mobile developers with only half of the best-selling iOS apps of all-time having some sort of connection to the platform. Even with a Facebook integration, only a minority of users elect to use it over logging in a different way. Top iOS developer Pocket Gems, for example, said three weeks ago that it has had 18 million downloads so far and is making well over $1 million a month. Yet, we only pick up a little over 217,000 monthly active users logged into the company’s top game Tap Zoo through Facebook on AppData. On Instagram, we pick up 333,826 monthly active Facebook users, even though the company says MAUs are at least twice as high.
On top of that, Apple is stepping up enforcement around in-app payments, a move that would complicate any plans to bring Credits to mobile devices. Getting its core community of developers to choose HTML5 over native apps would give Facebook better access to downstream revenues and a cut of virtual goods transactions on phones.
February 11th, 2011 at 11:20 pm
[...] Ondrejka seems hot on using HTML 5 for Facebook games — but oddly, in order to get a piece of mobile revenues, I guess on the theory that [...]
March 5th, 2011 at 12:36 am
[...] is a key component of Facebook’s mobile strategy going forward and the company has actively been encouraging its biggest developers to experiment and push the [...]
April 25th, 2011 at 1:00 pm
[...] move comes at a time when the company is aggressively pushing HTML5 in its developer community. Chief technology officer Bret Taylor said earlier this year that mobile would be the primary focus [...]
April 27th, 2011 at 1:10 pm
[...] Facebook and Google have championed HTML5 as the future of building mobile applications, many developers still have yet to move away from [...]
June 1st, 2011 at 10:35 am
[...] app comes at an interesting turning point for social game developers on Facebook. Facebook, itself, has been nudging developers to build their work in HTML5, which would theoretically make titles easier to service and iterate upon for multiple devices and [...]
June 7th, 2011 at 2:47 pm
[...] that Facebook has held off on releasing a native tablet app and hinted that a more likely path for the company is to pursue an HTML5 version of the site. There are partly technical reasons for this. But another way to think about it is if Facebook [...]
June 17th, 2011 at 5:40 pm
[...] Ondrejka and Bruce Rogers, who came to Facebook through the Walletin acquisition last fall, have been building JSGameBench to test how quickly browsers can render moving objects. Still, this is an experiment and HTML5 is far away from offering comparable performance to native [...]
September 9th, 2011 at 9:02 pm
[...] Spartan to Include iOS, Android – The scope of Facebook’s HTML5-focused developer project has expanded from mobile Safari to include desktop, Android, iOS and the [...]
September 10th, 2011 at 1:31 am
[...] Spartan to Include iOS, Android – The scope of Facebook’s HTML5-focused developer project has expanded from mobile Safari to include desktop, Android, iOS and the [...]
September 10th, 2011 at 1:39 am
[...] Spartan to Include iOS, Android – The scope of Facebook’s HTML5-focused developer project has expanded from mobile Safari to include desktop, Android, iOS and the [...]