Wooga: It's not time for HTML5 yet

The German game studio Wooga, which develops mobile and social projects for Facebook, spoke about its experience with HTML5, at the same time opening the sources for Pocket Island.

In short, the experience of the authors of Diamond Dash with HTML5 is negative. As they say, it didn’t work out.

In May 2011, the management of Facebook turned to Wooga. They asked to make a social HTML5 project to run on mobile platforms. And by October, it – Magic Land Island – was launched.

However, “even by the middle of the development cycle, it became clear that HTML5 technology is not yet ready for widespread distribution,” the developers write in the blog, mentioning, among other things, problems such as slow loading, the need for a constant Internet connection, bad sound.

Of course, there are solutions. Moreover, “all those features that are possible in a native application can be implemented in HTML5 applications,” Wooga notes, adding, however, that it is difficult to do this, and it takes an order of magnitude more time.

However, it was not possible to polish the HTML5 game to a quality comparable to the native application of Wooga itself. The same need to be constantly online during the game strained players no less than a very long loading time. As a result, although the game gained 1.3 million downloads (mainly due to a cross-link with a successful Magic Land), it could not keep users.

For this reason, Wooga decided to leave HTML5 and Magic Land Island aside for now and take up native iOS applications.

For those who are still going to develop games using this technology, Wooga has opened the sources for the game, which is now called Pocket Island and demonstrates good results, including in the Korean market. So from now on, you can personally get acquainted with all the rakes that the company managed to step on when working with HTML5.