Google and Microsoft are heavily pushing the creation of HTML5 games for Chrome as well as IE9 and IE10. However, the opportunity is much greater for Mozilla, which isn’t nearly as active in this space as its rivals.
We stumbled over this bit of data during our routine checks of market share data that is provided by a number of reputable sources. This particular one comes courtesy of Valve’s Steam unit, which has become the dominant digital game distribution service worldwide. According to Valve, Steam had more than 30 million paying subscribers at the end of October 2010, about 5 million more than in January of that year.
The Steam Hardware and Software Survey for July 2011 reveals a huge gap between the browsers that are installed on the computers accessing the Steam service. Apparently, gaming enthusiasts have a preference for the Firefox browser. 63.05% of all Steam gamers using the Windows platform have a version Firefox on their computer, while only 19.82% have Internet Explorer and only 11.56% use Google Chrome. Valve did not offer a breakdown of versions among those browsers.
HTML5 gaming is still in its early days and both Microsoft and Google are aiming to capture a big chunk of that developing opportunity. Yet it is Mozilla that seems to currently own the enthusiast gaming market, at least as far as the presence of the browser on their computers is concerned. There is a tremendously influential user base that Mozilla could tap for its marketing and a quickly emerging segment of browser applications.
Should Mozilla go after this opportunity? We think so. There ought to be more to this than the current Mozilla Labs gaming site.
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