Re: Bring the group back to life - Call for consensus by 24 July 2020

Hi everyone and thanks for the intro Francois!

Like Noël, I'll share a bit more of my background. I'm part of the Chrome
team at Google and I'm the web gaming lead for the web developer relations
team. My mission is to improve the quality and success of web games on the
open web. My approach to achieve this is a combination of internal product
advocacy and external developer advocacy.

I personally think the keys to improving the ecosystem are more discovery
and monetisation opportunities for web games. On the discovery front,
Francois linked to a proposal for some additional metadata in the
Schema.org format <https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/2565> that
I'm hoping to get traction with. If anyone has thoughts please chime in!

I'm also well connected inside of Google across a variety of different
organisations which work in the web and HTML5 gaming landscape, so please
feel free to reach out to me for issues outside of just Chrome.

Before Google, I was an independent game developer and created a successful
mobile game called DUET (www.duetgame.com) which was downloaded over 20
million times across the iPhone and Android ecosystems – so I have some
experience building and launching successful games.

PS: My favourite game of all time is Zelda: Majora's Mask – due to the
innovative use of its time loop game mechanic.

On Fri, Jul 24, 2020 at 1:35 AM Vincent Scheib <scheib@google.com> wrote:

> I support the effort to revive the Games Community Group.  I also work on
> Chrome, with previous and current support for APIs seeing an increase in
> adoption by games on the web.  E.g.:
>
> GetGamepads has seen steady growth and a surge in recent months
> https://www.chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popularity/1916.
>
> We'd like to improve Pointer Lock by adding an unadjustedMovement option
> https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5723553087356928.
>
> With the deprecation of Flash we've seen a significant move of games being
> implemented directly on web platform technologies, which is great not only
> for the web but many web-adjacent products as well.
>
> Looking forward to seeing more activity here.
>
> On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 12:04 AM fd@w3.org <fd@w3.org> wrote:
>
>> Dear participants of the Games Community Group,
>>
>>
>> TL;DR
>> -----
>>
>> This is a call for consensus to:
>>
>> 1. Bring the Games Community Group back to life!
>> 2. Adopt the Community Group charter at
>> https://w3c.github.io/charter-drafts/games-cg-2020.html
>> 3. Nominate Noël Meudec (Facebook Instant Games) and Tom Greenaway
>> (Google) as co-chairs of the Games Community Group.
>>
>> Please voice support or raise potential concerns, preferably in response
>> to this email (but feel free to get in touch with me), by the end of
>> July 24th 2020. Silence is considered consent.
>>
>>
>> Longer version
>> -----
>> W3C organized a workshop on Web games last year. The workshop report [1]
>> highlighted needs and candidate technologies deemed useful to develop
>> games on the web. The workshop also revealed that it would be useful to
>> continue tracking and exploration of web technologies for games
>> development.
>>
>> Noël Meudec (Facebook Instant Games) and Tom Greenaway (Google), both in
>> Cc, indicated that they would be happy to help drive this tracking and
>> exploration work in a Community Group. As such I would like to propose
>> that the Games Community Group comes back to life and resumes discussing
>> web technologies as it did some years ago, with Noël and Tom as chairs.
>>
>> Both Noël and Tom have hands-on expertise in Web games, and associated
>> technical and business challenges. Tom was at the workshop where he
>> organized a session on discoverability and monetization [2], leading to
>> a recent proposal to extend schema.org properties for Web games [3].
>> Noël has been working with Chris Hawkins, who reported on Facebook's
>> experience with Instant Games at the workshop [4]. I'll let them
>> introduce themselves further :)
>>
>> The Games Community Group has been around since the inception of the
>> Community Group program. Many Community Groups have been created since
>> then and successful ones now tend to adopt a charter to specify scope,
>> process and participation rules. This makes it easier for companies to
>> join and participate. I propose that this group adopts a charter as
>> well, and prepared a draft charter accordingly [5]. The scope is the
>> same as the scope that appears in the description of the group [6]. The
>> rest is mostly boilerplate text common to most groups. Among other
>> things, this text clarifies that there will not be any Essential Claims
>> under the W3C Contributor License Agreement or Final Specification
>> Agreement, which should help companies to join and participate.
>>
>> Practically speaking, the group would document needs, track useful
>> technologies and remaining gaps, and steer standardization efforts to
>> address them. Goal is to use the Web Gaming Platform discussion forum
>> that Noël put in place for this [7]. On top of asynchronous discussions,
>> the group could organize a series of calls to invite presentations on a
>> particular topic or discuss solutions live.
>>
>> Is it worth it? I believe so! There have been many updates in relevant
>> Web technologies since the workshop and the status update I wrote back
>> in November 2019 [7] is already partially outdated given recent updates
>> to WebTransport, WebGPU, Web Monetization, etc. Tracking updates and
>> gathering game developers inputs on web technologies is key to ensuring
>> that these technologies support the right features for games.
>>
>> How does that sound? Please either express support or raise potential
>> concerns, preferably in response to this email, by the end of July 24th
>> 2020.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Francois
>> W3C Media & Entertainment Champion
>>
>>
>> [1] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-games/2019Mar/0001.html
>> [2]
>> https://www.w3.org/2018/12/games-workshop/report.html#discoverability
>> [3] https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/2565
>> [4] https://www.w3.org/2018/12/games-workshop/report.html#context
>> [5] https://w3c.github.io/charter-drafts/games-cg-2020.html
>> [6] https://www.w3.org/community/games/
>> |7] https://www.html5gamedevs.com/forum/40-web-gaming-platform/
>> [8]
>> https://www.w3.org/blog/2019/11/status-update-on-web-games-technologies/
>>
>>
>>