Item — HN Reader

Yeah there's lots of alternatives to the app stores for windows games. You can also just sell direct to consumer.

The real challenge with webassembly as it applies to games (at least large ones) is the asset size. AA - AAA games are 20-100 GB and that can't just live in browser cache.

Also, to be honest building a complex game and shipping it to the web is kinda crap shoot for other reasons. Games are power hungry, and don't want to be limited by browsers. Also, a browser is a massive application that sits around consuming resources that a AAA native game could use.

But of course, I imagine games will be developed differently to take advantage of the web (smaller games, streaming in levels / textures as needed, etc).

The total asset size doesn't matter much (see Google Earth which is probably backed by terabytes of data), but how much new data the game needs to present to the player per second (which means the games needs to be designed for a minspec bandwidth just like it needs to be designed for a minspec CPU and GPU).