Today, Google revealed the culmination of three years of work in creating a brand-new browser technology allowing the play of full-featured console-style games. That effort has resulted in the Google Chrome Native Client, which Google showed off at the GooglePlex yesterday. VentureBeat reports that the client allows games running within Chrome full access to hardware acceleration.
Square Enix president Yoichi Wada was on hand to announce his support for the tech, and to show off a version of SE-subsidiary IO Interactive’s Mini Ninjas.
“Let us begin this new era together,” Wada said. “Google’s native client will be welcomed worldwide as a truly innovative technology for the information technology industry and game industry as well.”
Google said that it would be easy for developers to port existing PC and console games to the Chrome native client. Super Giant Games’ Bastion, which has already been released for PC and Xbox Live Arcade, is already available for demo on Chrome. Players can try it out here.
In addition, the Unity game engine will now have a check box to publish a Unity-based game to run on the native client. Less rewriting of code in order to reach over 200 million Google Chrome users. Five Unity-based titles will be available on the Chrome Web Store soon.
“These examples show the support for the native client,” said Christian Stevanson, Google product manager for native client. “Games are a category that push the boundaries of what is possible on a platform.”
This also dovetails with Google’s recent news that Chrome would support gamepads in a Q1 2012 update. These combined technologies essentially allow for full-featured gaming from your browser. Google is working on adding support for memory-mapped files and web sockets in the future.
