GDC 2015 is a milestone in a collaboration between Mozilla and the world’s biggest game engine makers, towards bringing high performance games to the Web without plugins. Unity Technologies is including the WebGL export preview as part of their Unity 5 release, available today. Epic Games has added a beta HTML5 exporter as part of their regular binary engine releases. This means plugin-free Web deployment is now in the hands of game developers working with these tools. Now developers can unlock the world’s biggest open distribution platform leveraging two Mozilla-pioneered technologies, asm.js and WebGL.

Browser vendors are moving to reduce their dependency on plugins for content delivery, with Chrome planning to drop support for NPAPI entirely. Developers such as King, Humble Bundle, Game Insider, and Zynga are using Emscripten to bring their C and C++ based games to the Web. Disney has shipped Where’s My Water on Firefox OS, which was ported using the same technology. Emscripten allows developers to cross-compile their native games to asm.js, a subset of JavaScript that can be optimized to run at near native speeds.

Browser support for the underlying Web standards is growing. WebGL has now spread to all modern browsers, both desktop and mobile.

"With the ability to reach hundreds of millions of users with just a click, the Web is a fantastic place to publish games," said Andreas Gal, CTO of Mozilla. "We’ve been working hard at making the platform ready for high performance games to rival what’s possible on other platforms, and the success of our partnerships with top-end engine and game developers shows that the industry is taking notice."

At GDC, Mozilla is showcasing a few examples of HTML5 using handwritten JavaScript. The Firefox booth includes a demonstration of an ubiquitous product called Tanx, developed by PlayCanvas. It runs on multiple desktop and mobile platforms. It can even be played inside an iOS WebView, launched within Twitter. Gamepad and multiplayer support are also part of the experience. Mozillais also featuring The Marvelous Miss Take by Wonderstruck and Turbulenz. This title is soon to ship on both Firefox Marketplace and is available on Steam today. For Steam distribution, the HTML5 application is packaged as a native application.

Mozilla is also showcasing some technologies such as WebGL 2 and WebVR, as well as updated developer tools aimed at game and Web developers alike. These tools are demonstrated in Mozilla's recently released 64-bit version of Firefox Developer Edition. Mozilla is also be providing developers access to SIMD and experimental threading support. These technologies are now available in Firefox Nightly Edition.