Google Chrome apps are riding off into the sunset

Heads up browser game developers, if you’ve been working on a Google Chrome app version of your game, you may need to change course. Google has announced that after three years, they’re shutting down Chrome apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux. 

In a blog post, vice president of product management Rahul Roy-Chowdhury writes that after its inception three years ago, Google is shutting down the app web store because many of its offerings are available on web applications that work on different types of browsers.

Over the next year, Google says new Chrome apps will only be functional on Chrome OS devices, and in late 2017, the Chrome Web Store won’t show Chrome apps for Windows, Mac, or Linux. 

Roy-Chowdhury writes that only 1 percent of Chrome users across these three operating systems were using Google apps at all.

It’s a quiet end for what was once a niche platform that offered a home for a certain subset of game developers such as Goodgame Studios and Plarium, and its closure will mean that a host of browser games likely will only be playable on devices operating Chrome OS. 

Previously, Google had shut down its Native Client technology, which briefly hosted games like Bastion in Google Chrome, and allowed developers to publish their games in the browser as well as on Steam. 

Google is encouraging developers to migrate their Chrome apps to the web, if they haven’t done so already.