Ok so first I remember a time basically like 3 to 5 months ago when there were tons of exciting games being made oncluding myself lol.Now it seems like that feeling and experience has went away.
It seems like all the gamedevs that wwere mking all these awesome games have advanced as a gamedev in general.Now I’m not saying there’s no gamedevs on playcanvas,but I’m saying it has slowed down since october sixth.And how do I know this it’s because I’m looking at the analytics.
Seems like playcanvas is mostly favored in china and the average page visits is 100,000 this kinda sucks because at some point it had over 1 million what happened is the question?Do people just not like playcanvas or have they lost interest.
Public analytics can only tell you so much. Many of the games, applications that are published won’t tell you what they are made with.
Most that use PlayCanvas do so for commercial purposes so they probably on visit the forum a few times when they get stuck. When they release whatever they are working on, it is rarely announced.
Also, don’t forget that PlayCanvas is part of Snap Inc and the games on the Snap app are made with PlayCanvas.
Well, it’s probably because of the time currently. I mean, some people have school to attend and jobs outside of Playcanvas. But I agree with @yaustar as well. Btw, do you think I should use Unity or Unreal?
Depends on what you need and/or what is going to get the job done. Both are fine engines. Unreal comes with blueprint out of the box whereas Unity has more of a developer community and uses C# which allows for fast code iterations compared to compiling C++.
Aside from the points made by others, your graphs don’t show much of a trend. They show a dip mid-summer and then a rebound back to approximately April levels. I suspect that only the admins really know what the current trends are. And nobody really knows what the trends may be going forward.
I’ve been making games on the ‘web’ platform for 14 years using a whole range of different tech, and Playcanvas, in my opinion, has it fairly nailed at this time. It’s the best engine for 3D dev targeting the mobile web, presently. When Flash ‘died’, I boldly proclaimed that when a ‘Unity like tool targeting the web came along, the absence of Flash no longer mattered’ - Playcanvas is this tool. The question is, are clients still paying for content on this platform, and in doing so keeping the tool relevant? In my experience as a freelancer, yes, there is plenty demand out there for such!
I’ve recently finished an epic update to a huge game I helped make for the BBC, using Playcanvas (https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/games/operation-ouch-invasion-of-the-snotulons) - I can’t wait for the update to go live, as it makes the game at least 300% more awesome… I’d absolutely look to Playcanvas for the next project, and am indeed engaged with another client, using it daily.
Oh and the open source nature of the Playcanvas runtime means that ‘it’ won’t die, so long as there are forks out there!
I agree. I learned a bit of ThreeJS, and then a ton of BablyonJS before I found PlayCanvas. In my opinion PlayCanvas is much more polished. Both ThreeJS and BablyonJS are alright, but their editors are pretty questionable, and they both involve a lot more micromanaging.
And sure, Unity is attempting to improve their webGL presence, but I don’t think it’s ever going to be less bulky than PlayCanvas. When you’re developing for the web with Unity it feels like you’re using a watered down version of the engine on top of that.
For me, there’s no competition. PlayCanvas is my choice for webGL applications. And I’ll admit my brother and I also use it for our desktop applications with Electron, but I’m not sure how commonplace that is.
Playcanvas is an extemely powerful tool and definitely one of the best engines for the web out there :).
I’ve been working like crazy for Disney to release a game called Cart Blaster (available on the Disney Now app ;), new themes & minigames soon! ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1sweMStaI4
I have considered a variety of tools, such as Three.js, but Playcanvas is so feature rich that it was an easy choice to make, to be honest.
A lot of developers do not visit forums and don’t contribute to github.
Plus public analytic will not show actual users from just random people visiting site or playing a playcanvas game from public links.
Me personally, constantly got freelance projects, where I use PlayCanvas, many of projects are for clients that never seen it. And most of them, get impressed by speed and quality of what can be done with PlayCanvas, and after getting used to seamless collaborative workflow, struggle to try anything less convenient (that is everything else ).
So no, PlayCanvas is not dying, it serves fairly niche but strong userbase. And with it, it helps to grow WebGL industry as one of the main players.
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