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A browser game is a video game that is played on the internet using a web browser.D Schultheiss: Long-term motivations to play MMOGs: A longitudinal study on motivations, experience and behavior, page 344. DiGRA, 2007. They are sometimes referred to more specifically by their format, such as Adobe Flash games or HTML5 games. They are generally free-to-play and can be either single-player or multiplayer. It is not necessary to install a browser game; simply visiting the webpage will run the title in a browser. Some browser games were also made available as Mobile game, , or console titles. However, the browser version may have fewer features or inferior graphics compared to the others, which are usually native apps.
Browser games have existed in various forms since the origins of the open internet in the 1990s. However, the 2000s were a "golden age" for the medium, and a great many were created with Adobe Flash during the period. The 2000s also saw the rise of social network games such as FarmVille, and the web ecosystem of the time was a "creative vortex" of rapid iteration and development, which had a huge influence on independent video games. Ultimately, the decline of Flash as a format and the rise of mobile gaming in the 2010s brought an end to the scene, though there have been more recent developments such as .io games.
Flash games operated using the Flash Player plug-in. Support for this outside of China was shut down on December 31, 2020, and since then playing these games has required unofficial methods, such as third party plug-ins. Thousands of Flash games have been preserved by the Flashpoint project. The emulation plug-in Ruffle aims to continue browser accessibility of Flash games.
Browser technology quickly began to mature in the mid-1990s with support for browser plug-ins and the introduction of JavaScript. More advanced browser interactions, unbounded by the restrictions of HTML and that used client-side processing were possible. Among other browser extensions, these new plug-ins allowed users to run made in the Java language and interactive animations created in Adobe Animate. These technologies were initially intended to provide web page developers tools to create fully immersive, interactive websites, though this use fell out of favor as it was considered elitism and broke expected browsing behavior. Instead, these technologies found use by programmers to create small browser games among other unexpected uses such as general animation tools.
Sites began to emerge in the late 1990s to collect these browser games and other works, such as Sun Microsystems' HotJava. These sites started to become a popular commodity as they drew web visitors. Microsoft acquired one such site, The Village, in 1996, and rebranded it as the MSN Games, offering various card and board browser games. ClassicGames.com was created in 1997 to host a selection of classic, Java-based online multiplayer games such as chess and checkers; its popularity led Yahoo! to purchase the site in 1998 and rebranding it as Yahoo! Games.
Many Flash games in the late 1990s and early 2000s received attention through the use of shock comedy or Serious game, like McDonald's Videogame, a satire of McDonald's business practices, or Darfur is Dying, about the War in Darfur, Sudan. In 2017, Julie Muncy writing for Wired said, "Flash games lent themselves to the exaggerated and cartoonish, a style that eventually evolved into an affection-at least amongst its best creators-for beautiful grotesquerie. Like much of the younger gaming internet, Flash games defined boundaries simply to cross them; the best titles straddled a weird line between innocence and cruelty, full of gorgeous gore and enthralling body horror". In Pico's School, based on the Columbine shootings, the player must take down a Goth subculture school shooter. There are a few other controversies involving browser games and real-world events, such as the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting reenactment V-Tech Rampage, and NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre targeting the game Kindergarten Killers after the 2012 Sandy Hook shootings.
Expansion of broadband connectivity in the early 2000s drew more people to play browser games through these sites, as well as added attention as viral phenomenon. New sites like Kongregate and Armor Games arose for hosting Flash-based games while also offering their own titles, while companies like PopCap Games and King launched their own portals featuring titles they had developed. Social media sites also drove more players to browser games. Facebook, after launching in 2004, added support for browser game functionality that integrated with its social network features, creating social network games, notably with Zynga's FarmVille. The success of browser games did hurt some developers. Humongous Entertainment reported that they lost players to Flash games in the early 2000s.
Steve Jobs' open letter to Adobe in 2010 stated that Apple would not support Flash on the iPhone platform due to security concerns and other factors. Critics pointed out that the move was made in order to promote Apple's own "walled garden" approach, and that Jobs personally "hated" Flash. The move ultimately led to a long term deprecation of Flash, with Adobe announcing a move to the open HTML5 standard the following year, and developers abandoned the platform.
Some browser games did continue to be made in other formats throughout the early 2010s, including HTML5, WebGL, and WebAssembly. Adobe announced the discontinuation of the format in 2017, and this took place in 2021. Projects such as the Flashpoint Archive exist for the preservation of these titles.
The first experiments with new features, primarily the canvas element, allowed the developers to demonstrate, using the example of the early but popular and attractive games BrowserQuest and Contre Jour, that the capabilities of HTML5 as a technology are sufficient for developing projects that provide the player with a first-class gaming experience.
Since the introduction of HTML5 as a standard in 2008, the development games based on it has followed the path of mastering new emerging capabilities for rendering dynamic scenes - starting with the Canvas element which allowed in combination with JavaScript rendering of dynamic scenes and originally included in HTML5 specification, and also with WebGL (2011) and WebGPU (2021) technologies, both dramatical increasing developer capabilities.
Slither.io was the second .io game to be released , which is a free for all multiplayer game that is in the Snake genre. The basic premise of the game has 50 players compete to eat colored orbs and grow as large as possible, while destroying other player's snakes. The game was created in 2016 by Steven Howse, a self-taught independent developer who was inspired to make it after playing Agar.io. The game quickly rose to be the top game on many platforms.
Starting in mid-2016, soon after the popularity spikes of Agar.io and Slither.io, more games in the .io games genre began to be released. Many of these games were simple clones of popular games, usually released in a top down-format. Some notable games released in this period include Diep.io (another game by Matheus Valadares), ZombsRoyale.io, Surviv.io, Shellshock.io, Hole.io, and Snake.io. These games all remain popular and are some of the most played games in the .io games genre, but many websites still exist that use variations or ripoffs/clones like Cool Math Games.
.io games became very popular during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 to 2021, because of their accessibility on the web. Most games, not just .io games, however, also experienced growth during this time.
Since 2021, .io games have generally declined in popularity for varying reasons, such as lack of updates and the rise of mobile and video gaming. As of 2024, many once-popular .io games have had a notable decrease in players.
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