Wooga and HTML5 - Not Ready for Primetime Yet?

I will first make a disclaimer: this is my opinion, not that of Gamzee.

Magic Land Island App icon

And:

This is an awful comparison. Here, Wooga is comparing a better-performing native title to an HTML5 title. And in two different genres (Magic Land Island is a city-building game, Diamond Dash is a casual arcade game). A better comparison would be to track performance among similar titles, one native, one HTML5. Picking out a key quote:

This shows the ridiculousness of the comparison. I'll eat an Ed Hardy trucker hat if Wooga's getting 50% 1-day retention on the desktop/Flash version of Magic Island. A better comparison (although still flawed as I'll show below) would be to track 1D retention on Magic Land and Magic Land Island. At least the games are substantially similar.

So the larger question -- is HTML5 not "there yet?" I think it's a little premature for Wooga to make that pronouncement. Magic Land Island is a decent game, and a good proof of concept for what Wooga was able to do with the technology. But is it something users are dying to play?

Not really. It's a port/re-imagining of their existing Flash game, Magic Land. There's zero integration with the Flash/desktop Magic Land game -- meaning users can't play their existing cities on their phone, which would be the main draw of suddenly having a mobile version of an existing Flash game. MLI wasn't redesigned from the ground up for mobile -- the UX and gameplay are still the desktop version, just tweaked a bit to display properly.

So what are you left with? A port of their existing game that doesn't integrate with that game and something that has controls and gameplay that weren't designed for or optimized for mobile devices. Oh, and most importantly, it's a game that seems to have been designed to hit lowest-common denominator display, meaning instead of showing high quality animations on mobile devices that can handle it (like the iPad 2), those settings were turned off or dialed way down on all devices. That makes no sense. HTML5 performance depends on your hardware. On desktop, it's as good as or better than Flash. On iPad 2, it's almost as good. It then goes down from iPhone 4S to iPhone 4 to some Android phones to an iPod Touch or iPhone 3GS to some of the Samsung Android devices.

HTML5 is very promising tech. You can build awesome mobile and cross-platform games on it (for example, our own Skyscraper City - apps.facebook.com/skyscrapercity). But it requires a lot of work, from designing in fallbacks and failovers for different device capabilities to rethinking the type of gameplay and UX that works on mobile.

It would have been nice if Wooga gave HTML5 a fair shot -- by creating a game designed for mobile platforms -- rather than making a crummier version of an existing game. I would posit that the failure of Magic Land Island has more to do with the game selection and tech implementation than any shortcomings in HTML5 at the present.