Web Native Game Development

Jun 4, 2026 by SED

The web has quietly become one of the most capable platforms for game development. Advances in WebAssembly, WebGL, and WebGPU have given developers tools that rival native desktop performance, while game engines like Unity and Godot have added robust web export pipelines. However, building games for the browser comes with its own set of constraints including file size, browser compatibility, and the need to quickly capture and maintain the player’s attention.

Erik Dubbelboer is a Principal Engineer at Poki which is a web games platform serving over 100 million monthly users. He’s also a game developer himself, with titles including Silly Skies and Village Builder. His unusual position building developer tools that power the platform, while also shipping games on it, gives him a rare perspective on what it actually takes to succeed in web game development.

In this episode, Erik joins Joe Nash to discuss the history of web games from the Flash era to today’s renaissance, how WebAssembly and WebGPU have transformed what is possible in the browser, the tradeoffs between different game engines for web publishing, and more.

Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder, who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry’s Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

Thanks to our sponsors

This episode is brought to you by:

estuary.dev
Every AI team eventually hits the same wall. The models are solid, the infra is solid, but the data coming in is hours old because the pipeline is batch when it should be streaming and nobody’s had time to fix it. That’s not a modeling problem. That’s a pipeline problem.
Estuary gives you CDC, batch, and streaming in one platform. 200 plus connectors, live in hours, not weeks. Your AI is only as good as your pipeline. estuary.dev
www dot Guardsquare dot com.
In mobile application security, ‘good enough’ is a risk.
Guardsquare uses advanced, multi-layered code hardening techniques and automated runtime application self-protection and mobile application security testing, combined with real-time threat monitoring, to deliver the highest level of mobile app security.
Discover how Guardsquare brings all these together to provide mobile app security for your Android and iOS apps without compromise at www dot Guardsquare dot com.
tigerdata.com
If you’re running Postgres in production, you’ve probably felt the moment analytical queries start fighting your transactional workload. Most teams end up adding a second database and all the pipeline complexity that comes with it.
Tiger Data, creators of TimescaleDB, takes a different approach. We extend Postgres with hybrid row and columnar storage so one table handles both writes and analytical scans. Native Compression cuts storage costs up to 95%. Continuous aggregates keep dashboards live without batch jobs. And it scales to petabytes without you re-architecting.
Companies like Cloudflare, Octave Energy, Schneider, Axpo, and Flowco run production workloads on Tiger Data today.
No stale data. No second system to operate. Just Postgres, managed for you, ready for the workload you’re building toward.Try it free at tigerdata.com

estuary.dev

www dot Guardsquare dot com.

tigerdata.com

Subscribe to the newsletter

Related episodes

Subscribe
to the newsletter