Why YoYo Games bet on HTML5

Launched in 1999, YoYo Games’ development environment GameMaker shares much of Unity’s spirit in its remit to democratise game creation. But GameMaker simplifies things further by providing a drag-and-drop interface option that removes the coding portion of development entirely.

And while Unity Technologies is currently working on Flash export support, YoYo Games has decided to back HTML5 – releasing an HTML5 compliant beta version of GameMaker last month.

But with most people’s experience of the web standard’s fifth revision a decidedly underwhelming one following its sluggish appearance in Google’s Chrome web browser, what was behind YoYo's decision to focus on HTML5 rather than Flash?

“I think as a general gamers thing Flash is able to sort through more sprites and stuff, but it’s not going to be long before HTML5 starts overtaking,” YoYo Games head of development Mike Dailly tells us. “[All the browsers are] trying to out-do each other, which Flash doesn’t really have - nobody’s really pushing Adobe that much.

YoYo Games head of development Mike Dailly (left) and CEO Sandy Duncan

“Whereas if you’ve got three or four other vendors that are just getting better all the time, you have to up your game to keep it going. So I think the browser war, now that it’s kicked off, is just going to keep speeding it up.”

Choosing to support HTML5 is a gamble, given that the standard is still in development and not yet locked down. But YoYo Games CEO Sandy Duncan doesn’t see it as a major risk.

“I think it took ten years to lock down the spec for what was XML - or HTML4 technically - and in the interim people did rather a lot with the internet!” Duncan observes. “So whether HTML5 is locked down or not doesn’t really bother us – the vast majority of it is available and clear.”

In fact, the only real limitation YoYo has encountered so far has been HTML5’s Javascript performance on mobile devices.

“We’ve been doing some benchmarking on mobile with real-world benchmarks, and we’re not seeing massive improvements,” Duncan explains. “We did some benchmarking and put some iPad 2s together, one running iOS4, the other iOS5 - both running the HTML5 version of They Need To Be Fed. There was a literal ten-times frames per second performance difference between them.”