I’m brand new to PlayCanvas, and think it looks great
I’d like to see a list of
- Steam games released using PlayCanvas
- Top web games/apps built using PlayCanvas
- Top opensource examples (other than the tons that are on the site itself)
- Which is the most active developer community? This forum/reddit/discord?
I’ve always wanted a game engine that can build for web first, and also build apps, which it looks like PlayCanvas can do well using pcui
I’ve googled “awesome playcanvas” and have come across alot of great looking demos, and tried to use SteamDB to see if I could spot games built with PlayCanvas, but haven’t found anything yet.
Any pointers? Thanks!
I’m not aware of any that are publicly known to use PlayCanvas. It’s not that common to see web games published on Steam (there are a few though!)
Publicly listed ones can be found here Made with PlayCanvas | PlayCanvas Developer Site and the awesome PlayCanvas page you found before. I’ve also made my own video here https://twitter.com/yaustar/status/1727352849821257887?t=Ka19VitOW5G_Zh4RvAwT0A&s=19
I’m not aware of any myself. Maybe Brutal Strike but that’s about it off the top of my head.
Forums and Discord
Thanks for the info - much appreciated - I’m surprised that people don’t wrap PlayCanvas games in Electron/NW.js/etc - there must be mobile games that do this using Cordova or something, I’d think?
also, one more thing 
I see you’re doing PRs against Phaser now, and Phaser Studio is announced, and of course many PlayCanvas demos/etc are done by you as well, plus PRs against the PlayCanvas engine.
Both Phaser and PlayCanvas seem to hit similar spots (html5 game engines) - what’s up with the Phaser work? is it related to PlayCanvas in anyway? I know Phaser has been around for a long time, but trying to see what’s happening in this space, as I always thought that “mobile first” was truly best delivered via the web, not appstores
Thanks!
If people are targeting Steam and mobile, they will be more likely to use Unity or some other native engine instead unless they also have a browser target platform.
Monetisation through the browser is pretty limited, both in reach and options.
I talk about it here a bit 🎙 Interview with Steven Yau | Web Game Dev
I’m no longer with PlayCanvas and use Phaser in my day job.
Phaser recently got funding which is awesome as it means there’s more game dev tech for the web being backed by orgs or money these days.
I see use PlayCanvas for some personal projects which you can see in the WIP section of the Discord server.
Cool - thanks again - so I assume they must be very comparable? Or is one much better than the other?
I’d love to be able to build some expertise in a 2d and 3d game engine, which is great at building UI apps too, and delivers as smallish payload sizes if run on the web. I know about Godot/Defold of course, but Defold doesn’t seem to have a app layer, like PlayCanvas. Does anyone ever build web apps using Phaser? and I see Phaser supports 2d, not 3d
and it doesn’t seem like PlayCanvas has a huge community, though it is hard to tell, because of the 3 different forums, and small/no presence on steamdb/reddit. Do you think it’s still quite lively?
They have different features and focuses. Phaser is 2D only so as you can imagine, it has a very rich 2D feature set. PlayCanvas is heavily focused on the 3D aspect although has some 2D centric features like sprites.
Not sure what you mean by app layer
Yes, it’s very popular for web 2D games (Vampire Survivors was made with Phaser and is still used for the browser version of the game. PC and console versions use Unity) and there are definitely some (web) apps using Phaser at some layer.
Depends on your definition on ‘huge’. Reddit is barely used and is only there because a community member create the r/ . PlayCanvas now owns it but generally it’s unmaintained.
Forums and Discord is where the main public activity is (as well as Twitter). Much is of PlayCanvas usage, the public doesn’t see because it’s predominately paid users and they don’t announce tech that they use.
Re Steam, as mentioned above, if someone is targeting Steam, they would more than likely use a native engine like Unity, Unreal etc. There’s little advantage in using a web engine unless there was a browser target too.
thanks again for all the great info - much appreciated!