Wonder Interactive’s The Immersive Web will play Unreal 4 games on the web
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Alex St. Louis, the founder of Wonder Interactive, has always dreamed of enabling high-end games like those built with the Unreal engine to run on the open web. And his company has built the platform to make it happen, and he calls it The Immersive Web.
St. Louis believes his company is an infrastructure firm that is going to provide the onramp to the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One. But first things first. St. Louis wants to get Unreal Engine 4 games, and eventually Unreal Engine 5 games, to run on the web.
This kind of technology is important, as platforms, and game developers have been squaring off in a bid for power over the $200 billion game industry. Epic Games sued Apple and Google to escape from the 30% royalty rates on the app stores. Valve decided to disallow blockchain games on its Steam platform, irking numerous NFT game companies. St. Louis believes the open web is key to bypassing the closed platforms.
But in the past, only crappy games seemed to run on the web. Apple has done little to modernize Safari’s ability to run high-end games, as that would hurt its app store revenues. Google’s Chrome is pretty advanced, but St. Louis believes the technology is at hand to run much higher quality graphics on the web.
“We want developers to be able to ship an application or game on the the open web and be able to establish very importantly a direct relationship online with their users,” said St. Louis.
Wonder Interactive is building a platform and suite of tools to enable any developer to bring their game or real-time 3D
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