Revolutionizing Game Development: PlayCanvas and the Web's Potential with Will Eastcott

Announcer:

Today on Building The Open Metaverse.

Will Eastcott:

In the context of web development, the most successful projects tend to be open-source, that was my new world and I had to adapt. So now it's like everything we do, the default is that it's open-source.

Announcer:

Welcome to Building The Open Metaverse, where technology experts discuss how the community is building the open metaverse together, hosted by Patrick Cozzi and Marc Petit.

Marc Petit:

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Building The Open Metaverse Season 6, the podcast that showcases the community of artists, developers, researchers, executives, and entrepreneurs who are building the internet of tomorrow.

My name is Marc Petit, and my co-host is Patrick Cozzi. Patrick, how are you?

Patrick Cozzi:

Hey Marc, I'm doing well. As you know, 3D on the web is really dear to my heart. This season, we're exploring in more detail how the web is becoming an increasingly viable platform for real-time 3D. 

Today's guest is a total OG of graphics on the web.

Marc Petit:

Yes, absolutely. Today's guest on the show needs no introduction for anyone familiar with the world of web-based gaming and immersive experiences. We have with us Will Eastcott, a gaming industry veteran who has many years of experience working on blockbuster AAA Titles like Call of Duty.

However, Will is best known as the co-founder and CEO of PlayCanvas, the pioneering open-source game engine that has revolutionized outreach to graphics games and interactive experiences created and delivered on the web.

Will's passion for open standards and democratizing game development led him to open-source the PlayCanvas engine back in 2014. That pivotal move kicked off a vibrant global community of developers leveraging PlayCanvas's power. Will, we're very happy to have you with us. Welcome to the show.

Will Eastcott:

Thank you, Marc. It's a pleasure to join you and Patrick today, looking forward to our conversation.

Patrick Cozzi:

It's great to see you. To kick things off, could you share a bit about your earlier career and how you got into game development?

Will Eastcott:

Back in the 80s, when I grew up, every kid in the UK had an eight-bit microcomputer; it was just taken for granted that every kid learned how to program. I think it was around 1984 when I played a game called Elite, a 3D space trading game that you could play on a 32-kilobyte eight-bit microcomputer, and you could say that's my first experience with an explorable universe or maybe even metaverse, where you could go anywhere and do anything. I think from that moment, I was really hooked on computers and video games.

Fast-forward to going to university, I started computing at Imperial in London, and in my final year, I had to do an internship. We had a lot of investment banks that came into Imperial; they were looking for interns, and I thought, I'm just not going to fit in the investment bank, so I went to see the careers officer, and I said, "Look, do you have anything a little bit different, a little bit unusual?" And she said, "Yeah, there's a VR company in Manchester, and they're looking for an intern." I took that opportunity and when I went to work there, the office was just full of Silicon Graphics workstations.

I was working on an Indigo2 machine, which was probably worth about $30,000. Across the other side of the room, there was an SGI Infinite Reality, which was probably worth about half a million dollars or something, so you can imagine, as a computing student, I was on cloud nine; I was really enjoying myself. I was learning to program C, working on asset processing code, and getting my first taste of OpenGL. When I came to leave university, I ended up at Criterion Software, which really started my journey into the video gaming industry.

Marc Petit:

Interesting. Criterion was quite an adventure. It was one of the first commercial game middleware and even game engine solutions on the market, RenderWare, and the honorable Mike King and all that gang of people.

What are some of your most memorable experiences or proudest moments from Criterion?

Will Eastcott:

I'm somebody who's fascinated by technology; I'm the kind of guy who would go down to an arcade and just stare at the games instead of playing them. Anything where I get to see new technology in action, I love that.

I used to get an opportunity at Criterion to experience the very first revisions of new console hardware, and that was incredibly exciting for me. For example, Sony shipped Criterion the first PlayStation, two dev kits in Europe outside of a Sony studio; I think these machines were called EB-2000s; they were like a metal cube. These were the kind of things where if you go up and touch them and you hadn't discharged your static electricity first, you would make them inoperable, but unwrapping one of these things and then going through the auto-generated translations from Japanese, it was so exciting, it was like Christmas come early.

Playing with these early dev kits was a lot of fun for me and my teammates. But then beyond that, I was working on the RenderWare engine as a programmer, but I was unlike most of the other guys on the team. I would actually have to get on a plane and go and visit a lot of studios. I would often have to go and work with game teams around the world; one time, I flew up to Rockstar North, and they showed me a game prototype, and they said, "Do you want to have a game?" And I'm like, "Yeah, I'm playing this thing."

I'm controlling this guy. He's running around and jumping in and out of cars and stuff, and I was just sitting there thinking, I don't get it. Normally, you get in a car, and you have to drive to the finishing line in the smallest time possible or something, but this didn't seem to have a goal.

Of course it was a sandbox game, it was Grand Theft Auto, and so I walked away from that, just not quite understanding this concept of a sandbox game, which is weird considering I loved Elite so much. 

Of course, it went on to be a massive success, and so it was really fun that we got to play a part in helping Rockstar build Grand Theft Auto. I helped Activision build Call of Duty on PlayStation 2. I got to work on FIFA with EA and lots of other games besides. It was a massively fun experience where I got to see the world, work with lots of talented teams, and work on lots of cool games.

Patrick Cozzi:

Well, you clearly had a very, very impressive career working on those AAA titles, and I appreciate your work. I spent a lot of time playing Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto.

What inspired you to shift gears a bit and focus on building a web-based game engine?

Will Eastcott:

I remember in 2010, I think I saw the WebGL spec being released. For anybody who cares about interactive graphics, for that milestone to arrive and not see that as a massive opportunity, I was so excited to get started with WebGL.

I thought this was a new adventure for me. I didn't know JavaScript at the time, I wasn't a web developer, I didn't have any experience with that, but it was clear that WebGL was going to auger in a new era of a 3D web where there'd be gaming experiences, e-commerce experiences, visualization simulation and lots besides, and plenty of things that I didn't even foresee at the time.

I knew it was a massive opportunity. So, I resigned from my role at Activision and immediately sat about starting up PlayCanvas.

Marc Petit:

And you became an entrepreneur.

Will Eastcott:

That was not in my plan at the time. I was just really focused on being a software engineer, but I just had a dream to build something new. Luckily, I met a lot of people on my journey who helped me learn new skills and just helped me along the way.

Marc Petit:

When you think back about that time jumping to become an entrepreneur to a brand new technology like WebGL, what were the biggest challenges from those early days?

Will Eastcott:

The difficulties surrounding raising money were tough for me. We were based in London, and I didn't really have access to the Valley investor community. We joined an accelerator called Techstars. We were in their first cohort in London, and I learned a lot on the business, sales, and pitching sides from participating in that program.

I'd always recommend that first-time entrepreneurs look to join an accelerator and just build their network that way, so that was great.

I would say on the business side of things, another problem that was, well, slightly problematic, should we say, for us, was that Apple was a bit late to the party integrating WebGL into Safari on iOS, so I think it was something like summer of 2014 when it finally landed in Safari, at least when Apple announced they were supporting it.

We were already working on PlayCanvas for three and a half years before our content actually ran on iOS. In those early years, I'd say there were many, many conversations with creative agencies and customers who were like, this is interesting, but you can't run this stuff outside of Android and the desktop, so we'll pass for now.

Patrick Cozzi:

You mentioned 2014, and I believe that's also when you decided to make PlayCanvas open-source. I was curious a bit about the motivation behind that and then the impact that it had.

Will Eastcott:

Open-sourcing technology, again, wasn't really something that was in my DNA; I'd come from EA, Activision, and Sony, where the idea of open-sourcing in-house technology was just absolutely unheard of at the time.

I had a reflex to it that was to protect the IP we were building, and we'd spent a huge amount of effort building our code base and the idea of just granting liberal access to it under an MIT license or something.

That was difficult for me to get used to, but over time, you spend time on GitHub, and you spend time with other developers, and you start to think less about protecting your technology and more about what's right for the developer. If you have a mindset of building something with the developer's needs in mind, you'll win in the long run. From a developer's point of view, they want ultimate visibility, access, and flexibility to work with technology.

That's a good thing because if you can deliver what the developer needs, you're going to build a very healthy community around that technology. We've seen GitHub turn into something that is really, truly loved by developers where you can build really vibrant communities, and so I've seen some real massive benefits from taking that leap of faith and putting our technology onto GitHub and slapping that MIT license on there, so no regrets now.

It was just in the early days that it was hard for me, so I would like to think people these days wouldn't hesitate like I did. The only mistake I'd say I've made is that I wish I'd done it sooner.

Marc Petit:

What or who got you over the fence? I'm not sure to actually do it because you're right; in 2014, open-sourcing was not as understood as it is now.

Will Eastcott:

In the context of web development, the most successful projects tend to be open-source, and that was my new world. I had to adapt to a web dev ecosystem and just kind of think that way. And it just took me a long time; like I said, it took me probably two or three years to change my mind around all of that. 

Now it's like everything we do, every new product we do on the PlayCanvas team, just automatically, the default is that it's open source. There'd have to be a really strong reason why we wouldn't open-source something.

Marc Petit:

You touched on something. What's your relationship? Because there are multiple open-source 3D engines on the web, is there a community? Do you guys talk? Do you guys compete? What is the relationship right there?

Will Eastcott:

Although we are not in regular contact and calling each other every week, the community is very friendly, very supportive, very respectful, and that makes it so pleasant to be part of. From previous years, maybe in the early days of running PlayCanvas, there have been instances where there'd be some maybe difficult conversations with other startups, maybe you feel like a startup is cloning what you're building, or there's some things like that that go on.

But I feel like all of the leaders now working on these projects are really great folks; I think everybody wants success and the best for everybody else working in this space because I think there's overlap, sure, between some of these products, but there we learn a lot from each other.

I think we help each other advance. Generally speaking, it's a really healthy community.

Patrick Cozzi:

Marc, I would plus one everything that Will just said; I think that folks want to see 3D on the web go further, and they really admire all the other projects. Kenny Russell from the Google Chrome team, who you remember who came on the podcast, chair of the WebGL working with the Chronos, when he would do the SIGGRAPH Boss, he would ensure that everyone would be able to show their work and built a very inclusive community. I think it's been very positive.

So, Will, continuing the PlayCanvas story, I believe PlayCanvas was acquired by Snap, and I was curious about some of the strategic rationale there and how that's helped you continue the growth.

Will Eastcott:

I'm pretty good at making friends at companies, and over the years, we've had pretty close relationships with the likes of Facebook, Google, Mozilla, and so on, and Snap. Throughout 2016, we were chatting with Snap, so they knew who we were and what our technology could do; they knew our skill set.

Towards the end of that year, they had a gaming platform on the drawing board. Based on my network, the team's skill set, and our tech, we were a really good fit for helping design and build this platform, which turned out to be Snap Games, which eventually launched in April 2019, I think.

When this opportunity came along, I was floored; the opportunity to build a gaming platform that would serve hundreds of millions of gamers was beyond my wildest dreams. For me, it was not the most difficult decision I ever had to face.

We joined Snap in early 2017 and focused very hard on making Snap Games as awesome as possible over the next couple of years. We got to work very closely with a curated set of developers that were selected for the platform, and those were really fun days when I was just seeing some incredible mobile games being built.

To me, it was an opportunity to show what the mobile web is capable of. If we picked the best game development talent and paired them with some really top-quality tools, we wanted to show what kind of gaming experiences you could do and that they could go head-to-head with native gaming experiences, and I think we proved that.

Marc Petit:

Would you say that that acquisition has accelerated the growth of PlayCanvas and its role in the open web?

Will Eastcott:

I don't know what would've happened had we remained independent; who knows? All I can say is that I am really happy with where PlayCanvas is at today. I'm happy with our mission and our vision for the future. I think things are going super well, and Snap's a great home for us. We're continuing to build a super talented team that's solving some very difficult problems, and that's what I love to do, so it's going really well.

Marc Petit:

We all know that Snap went through some ups and downs, and I think seeing their unwavering commitment to web gaming is great. It probably also speaks to the fact that you are running a very tight ship.

Will Eastcott:

Yeah, I think there's a lot to be said for that; I think when you've run a startup, and you know how to run something very leanly, I think that's appreciated by the people that are in charge of spending money. 

We're also a team that's really good at finding, you're seeking out ways to apply our technology to advance Snap's interests, and it'd just be building technology that's just generally strategically interesting and important.

Marc Petit:

In terms of authoring 3D content for the web, there are multiple ways of doing it. We mentioned a few 3D graphics and native engines, and Unity has a very good export to WebGL and WebGPU. There are platforms like Simplestream for Unreal Engine. So, how do you describe the unique aspect of PlayCanvas? We've seen a lot of people pick up PlayCanvas.

What's their motivation? What is unique about PlayCanvas that drives people to use it?

Will Eastcott:

PlayCanvas is really built for developers who want to treat the web as their lead platform. Other engines, you mentioned Unity there, essentially treated the web like a platform that you just port to; it's just another platform that you output a bill to. But the web is very different; it's not just like a console or some new hardware device; it's got very specific properties, so when you load web content, you're streaming it.

The way in which you incrementally load your scenes is important, and how you compress your scenes is important; download times are really important because you want to avoid your end users bouncing within the first few seconds, and to do that, you have to make your content interactive within a very short time. Making the initial payload super low and then using asynchronous streaming is a big deal.

The PlayCanvas engine itself, the runtime is about 300 kilobytes, and that's before you do tree shaking. We are able to have content load and become interactive within the blink of an eye; it's super important on the web. Beyond that, if you are developing on the web, you are debugging, you are profiling, you're just doing day-to-day development; that's difficult if you are using a cross-compiled WASM engine. If you're using an open-source JavaScript engine, you can open the dev tools, you can set breakpoints, the code is human-readable, you have source maps, and you have great profiling tools, so from a developer perspective as well, it's a really great experience.

On top of that, we've built a platform that is very unlike other game engines because it's browser-hosted; it's like Unity blended with Google Docs in a way. It's this online real-time collaborative platform and the first time as a content creator, you get into a PlayCanvas scene, and you start working side-by-side with another user, and you're both building up a scene together; that's a real revelation when you first experience that, I recommend people try that.

Of course, a lot of people say, “Yeah, but sometimes you want to work on you,” well, that's fine, and with PlayCanvas, you can essentially branch off the main scene work in isolation and then fold your changes back. You have the flexibility to work however you like, but that's important too.

I'll finish with the open source piece as well; companies like Unity are not embracing open source, shall we say, whereas we want to give our customers access to all of our code base so that they can do what they like with it, contribute, and feel part of our mission. I think that's another big deal as well.

Marc Petit:

If our listeners wanted to get a taste of PlayCanvas, what do you recommend they try? Is there a game or an innovative experience that you would recommend?

Will Eastcott:

There's a really awesome game studio who's building stuff with PlayCanvas right now. They're called Onrush, and they became well known for building an FPS game called Venge; you go to venge.io and play the FPS game. It's pretty fun. Right now, the team is almost live tweeting the development of their latest game, and it's clearly a GTA in the browser kind of game. I've been waiting for companies to build a game like that and execute it really well, and they seem to be doing a good job of that.

But there are a ton of really top-tier awesome brands that are publishing PlayCanvas content onto their web properties; you see companies like BMW, Polaris, Cartier, Mont Blanc, and Fjallraven, like loads of really cool brands, buildings e-commerce or advertising-based experiences as well.

If you Google “PlayCanvas awesome list,” it's essentially a GitHub-hosted list of just a ton of content that you can click through and see, but there's a ton of stuff out there.

Patrick Cozzi:

We spoke a lot about the tech that PlayCanvas is built upon, many of which are open standards, so I was wondering if you could speak a bit about your philosophy in adopting open standards and how it's helping push boundaries.

Will Eastcott:

When we started PlayCanvas, we needed a file format to load model and animation data. I designed a JSON format; I thought that made sense. Of course, down the road, you get to know JavaScript better, and the browser better and discover that parsing JSON is very expensive. Then, of course, the glTF format was born sometime afterward, and it had to wait until version two before it was impossible to pass up.

By version two, it was extremely well-designed and a natural choice to move to the glTF format and dump our JSON format. That meant that we didn't have to spend time designing that file format; we just had to adhere to the spec, write an importer and exporter, and we were done.

On top of that, you get to leverage all of the incredible tools built by the glTF ecosystem and even participate in steering the format. So, I've been involved in conversations around adding physics to glTF. I'm sure we've been at similar glTF forum events where we've talked about some of these topics, and it's great to be part of that community, so it makes 100% sense.

Patrick Cozzi:

I remember before glTF, I was working on something that was JSON plus binary, and then as soon as I saw glTF, I was like, let me go check this out.

Are there any directions that you think glTF should be going?

Will Eastcott:

I was a supporter of adding physics, and there is no reason not to add audio, so I think that all makes sense, especially in a metaverse context where you should be able to define an object and be able to take it from space to space. Wouldn't that be cool if I could have a lightsaber or something, and I could move through the metaverse and hold this thing, and I should be able to interact with it, and it should sound the way, and it should physically behave the same way it does across all the different spaces? I'm totally signed up for that, but the format itself is becoming more and more complex; there are more and more extensions being made.

I do have a bit of concern that it's going to become bloated or unwieldy over time, and there are big questions to be asked about how you cross-reference data across different glTF scenes.

I know that these things are being worked on, and I essentially trust the glTF steering group and the spec writers to make good decisions. I think there's a good track record, but like I said, I think the only thing I'm concerned about is the spec becoming so bloated that implementing it will be like writing a browser—it's so incredibly complex.

Marc Petit:

You're building a game engine, do you think game logic belongs ultimately to glTF? They have transportable smart objects and game logic.

Will Eastcott:

If you look at e-commerce use cases where you want to deliver something, I don't know, like a microwave that some company is trying to sell, you could set up some interactions, maybe some hotspots, with that 3D object. This means that it's in the hands of the content creators, the artists, to define those interactions instead of making it something that a programmer has to re-implement time and time again.

From that point of view, I think it makes a lot of sense, but when it comes to maybe replicating the real world using behavior graphs, I think the jury is still out for me, whether something so complex like a living, breathing environment can be represented that way, but it's exciting.

Marc Petit:

I wanted to get an opportunity to discuss and highlight what this might mean for the browser.

Can you speak to the kind of things that we would be able to do in a browser with technologies like WebGPU and WebXR?

Will Eastcott:

I mentioned 3D Gaussian Splatting, and that's something that the PlayCanvas team is pursuing quite aggressively at the moment. We've built this tool called Super Splat; I don't know if you've heard of it, but it is basically an editor, an optimizer for 3D Gaussian Splat scenes. As part of that, we've built a really high-performing runtime for rendering 3D Gaussian Splats.

I'll tell you something that I did recently, which was, I think Open AI launched Sora to have gen AI generate videos, and I took one of the videos, which was a camera, a viewpoint moving through an art gallery, and I fed that video through the 3D Gaussian Splat generation tooling and generated the splat, loaded into PlayCanvas, dropped in the first person character controller, and then moved around that scene. I'm really interested in this idea that you can use gen AI to generate environments without needing to write a single line of code; I didn't have to write any code to achieve that.

Right now, the results are a little bit rough, but you can see where this is heading, where gen AI is going to be able to generate coherent, consistent 3D environments that you can walk around. Maybe in the next few years, we'll be looking at rendering those scenes using WebGPU and being able to explore them in WebXR. But further down the road, we're talking five to 20 years, that time period maybe.

Don't get me wrong, things are accelerating pretty fast, so I could be completely wrong here and it could happen before that, but we're going to have 3D environments that will be hallucinated in real time on the GPU. What that means for the future of PlayCanvas, I'm not entirely sure; I'm just tagging along for the ride, and I'm finding it quite exciting.

It's incredible how things are moving right now. In the short term, we're going to see photorealistic experiences, e-commerce applications, and whatever repsets in the browser powered by WebGPU and WebXR, but down the line, Gen AI is going to be disrupting big time.

Patrick Cozzi:

Well, so much to unpack here. So, for Gaussian Splatting, how far do you think it goes? Does it replace triangles?

Will Eastcott:

We're very early in the R&D phase for Gaussian Splatting. Remember, it was only really a thing from last summer when Inria released that paper along with the tooling on GitHub. It's amazing to see what's been achieved in less than a year. Right now, people are working on run times for static scenes, but there's suddenly a lot of R&D going on to solve problems around animating for the Gaussian Splats. You hear about this concept of faulty Gaussian Splats where you're essentially doing a Gaussian Splats capture but over time.

We've been thinking on our team about the options for applying skinning techniques to Gaussian Splats and doing relatively cheap animation that way. But there's a lot of research going on into this right now, and we're going to see some incredible incremental advances over the next year.

Patrick Cozzi:

Is SuperSplat open source?

Will Eastcott:

It is, yeah. If you go to playcanvas.com/supersplat, you'll find the tool, and then there's a link to the GitHub repo. So, if anybody wants to join the mission and help advance this Gaussian Splat technology, then SuperSplat is definitely the most popular place to edit Gaussian Splats right now. You can get started today; you can use Luma AI, Polycam, or the Inverter tools to do the capture, load it into SuperSplat, chop out part of the scene, clean it up, or optimize it, and drop it into PlayCanvas, make a little demo, it's a lot of fun actually.

The reason why I'm so excited about it is that suddenly, anybody can create photorealistic content that looks amazing. It's not the case that it's like, I'll do some photogrammetry, and then I'll construct a mesh, and then I'll make normal maps and create all of the PBR textures, which needs a lot of expertise. 

Now, you can record a video, generate a PLY file, drop it into SuperSplat, save it, and drop it into PlayCanvas.

Marc Petit:

You reminded us that the technology was released last July, so it's not even a year old right now.

Let's get your crystal ball out. How do you see AI and machine learning affecting the interactive and game development process in the coming years? Can you tell us about the PlayCanvas copilot as well?

Will Eastcott:

We just released a Visual Studio plugin for PlayCanvas, which allows you to write PlayCanvas scripts, and they sync with your project on the server. The cool thing about running your VS Code is that you get access to all of the awesome VS Code extensions, including GitHub copilot. That's the first application of AI for PlayCanvas developers, but there's so much more we could do.

Obviously, if you were, I don't know, wanting to create a thumbnail for your project using a Gen AI service like DALL-E, for example, to do that is an obvious thing. You can just hook into a service like that and download an image. But of course, over time, we're going to see 3D assets being generated by Gen AI of sufficiently high quality that they could be used in production.

Marc Petit:

Do you have a timeframe in mind for that?

Will Eastcott:

I actually think within the next two years—maybe not in the next 12 months, but probably the 12 months after that—we'll have some seriously impressive assets generated by AI. I don't think we're going to have long to wait, basically. The thing we have to keep remembering is that this stuff is accelerating.

Marc Petit:

Any other emerging technology that you are excited about?

Will Eastcott:

On the subject of AI, I think it's going to enable a new generation of content creation tools because, at the moment, what tools developers are doing are trying to retrofit Gen AI services into their tooling.

Like in PlayCanvas, we can add a coding assistant or some automation, which allows you to create a scene by giving some prompts. There's going to come a tipping point where we're going to have to go back to the drawing board and build a new generation of content creation tools that not only play nice with Gen AI but also play nice with a new computing platform.

If we're talking about spatial computing and we're talking about voice, wire tracking, gesture tracking, those things where you can interact with a tool in a different way. We've seen a lot of interesting progress coming from Meta with Quest, we've seen Apple release the Apple Vision Pro, and there's a lot of prototyping of next-generation tools that I'm seeing people share on Twitter.

There are lots of really cool ideas about how you can sculpt content in 3D with your hands and interesting new ways to create.

Patrick Cozzi:

Well, there is definitely a lot of emerging tech to track here. What do you think it's going to take for instant web gaming to really take off?

Will Eastcott:

I would love to see web gaming grow in popularity. I think there are some things that are holding it back; off the top of my head, things like the way payments are managed through the web are not great right now, and the discovery mechanisms that we have on the web are very different from what you have to say on mobile platforms through app stores.

There's a learned process that every mobile device user fully understands where you visit an app store, look at the charts, pick a game in the top 10 or something, read the reviews, and install.

It's a lot harder on the web. You have a massive audience at your disposal, but reaching them is really tough. You have to be some wizard growth hacker to be super successful when building a web game these days.

I'm seeing some of them. I talked about the Onrush Studio earlier; studios like that that are building these drop-in, drop-out casual MMO-style games; I think they're showing a lot of promise. If we can just solve some of these problems around monetization and also have the platform holders, the browser vendors, work on their browsers to make the play nicer with browser gaming, especially on mobile, that would help a lot, too.

Marc Petit:

I'm pretty optimistic that we're seeing a lot of new studios and a lot of new games being built for the web, so I'm with you, hopeful and discovery. There is no reason why you could not build a web store or something equivalent to Steam for web games, so it's a little bit of a catch-22, but I feel the momentum is there right now.

To close that, as a veteran in the games industry, what advice would you give aspiring game developers looking to create web-based games and experiences?

Will Eastcott:

Well, we've just been talking about the fact that you have this huge audience when you target the web. To me, that is incredibly exciting, the fact that you could go on to PlayCanvas right now, spend the day just making a little casual game, hit publish, paste the link into Hacker News, and if your game is sufficiently fun and interesting to people, it will make it to the front page of Hacker News, and you'll instantly get a few hundred thousand players of your game through one channel, you could put it on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, so on and so forth.

There's incredible control that you have as a web developer to put your content out there and have people play it. I think that's incredibly exciting, nobody telling you what you can and can't publish, the ultimate freedom to publish the games you want to make. I would say it's a great place to learn. It's a bit of a Wild West, but I'm a big fan of the web; it's very exciting. I would encourage anybody to go there, and I would recommend coming and just hanging out on the PlayCanvas Discord and talking to some of the game developers already building stuff there. They'll tell you some of their stories about why they love building on the web.

Patrick Cozzi:

I love the enthusiasm and encouragement. Will, is there any person or organization that you'd love to give a shout-out to?

Will Eastcott:

You mentioned Ken earlier; I've got to say Ken's been awesome ever since we started PlayCanvas, what an ambassador for the web graphics community, so Ken Russell, what a guy.

But also, it is like an organization; this takes me full circle back to the beginning, where I said I grew up on an eight-bit computer. Here in the UK, we've got somewhere called the National Center for Computing History, I think it is, no, Center for Computing History, it's in Cambridge, and it's a living museum, you can go there and experience computing and gaming hardware from the last 40, 50 years.

Marc Petit:

I cannot thank you enough for taking us through your inspiring journey, sharing insights into PlayCanvas technology and philosophy, and giving us a glimpse into the exciting future that lies ahead for open web standards, immersive experiences, and AI-driven graphics.

It has truly been an honor to have you on the podcast. Thank you very, very much.

Will Eastcott:

Thanks, guys. It's been a pleasure.

Marc Petit:

A big thank you as well to our ever-growing audience, you can find us on all the podcast platforms, and you can reach out to us on our LinkedIn page or our website, buildingtheopenmetaverse.org.

Thank you, Patrick, thank you, Will, it's been a fantastic conversation, thank you guys.

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