Intro

I used to love Browser games.

Early to mid 2K, it was a hell of an experience to play multiplayer online over browsers, mostly medieval-themed or antic-themed strategies.

Let’s talk about it in that Post and what I would I loved them to do better.

A bit of knowledge

In the early and mid 2000, with the explosion of the web, the MMO market exploded, giving birth to games like World of Warcraft, Lineage, Guild wars and much more.

At the same time, browser based MMO games got a lot of traction.

It was a lot of fun to play them, and my very first experience with such games was awesome. The experience of multiplayer felt really different; playing against and with a lot (A LOT!) of players simultaneously was huge, games evolved in real time, it felt organic, living.

When you start being decent or good at a game, PvP, is a hell of a drug.

They were really tough games to play; You needed good scheduling, you needed a lot of time throughout your day but in tiny parts. Before smartphones, people working with computers were at advantages, after that, it was even worse to play, because you’d FOMO and use your phone constantly.

The « Freemium » system was very frustrating. While money can’t buy you skills, in such games, in the early part mostly, paying to get ahead of your direct opponents on the map would be a common play pattern. And if you don’t pay, even with skills, even with teams, playing against « whales » was difficult. And I’m not even mentioning cheaters abusing JavaScript capabilities to script to automate a lot of things into the game.

Rhythms

These games were hard to play mostly because of their pacing. They were slow as fuck. Games that you’d need to play throughout six months, a year, or even more. While fun at first, because of FOMO it was hard to « disconnect ». Team play helped, if you had one with decent and or good players, but even, it was difficult.

Shorter cycle, or « speed » kind of server and/or world were easier to play, but even that was too slow to be honest.

We needed a formating system; Very short cycles, short cycles, in-between cycles and slow cycles. Because yes, there is players for everything, there was player who wanted things to last longer, to restart again and again and over time would take over the world, and there was player who wanted to crack things as early as possible.

Shorter cycles would also pair well with very long cycles, because you could play a short game, multiple times over the month, while playing a long game. You could gain experience quicker, and take your fun of different phases of the game easier too.

Pay-to-win & Competitiveness

I understand well that you need to pay servers, and you also don’t want to stop players from playing. The monthly sub’ solution is possible only for big games, not for tiny buggy browser games.

But anything that asks for pay-to-win where you could gain valuable advantages within the game mechanics, like “buying resources” or “stoping all attacks from happening”, is horrible to play against.

There is the aesthetics, a la Fortnite, that could be a thing in certain type of games, but let’s be honest, it is not viable there too.

The solution to me would have been a double one;

• Pay-to-win but with no big advantages or with a caped system,
• Competitive system with short cycle competitive server where you would pay a PAF to eventually win a part of it if you finish in the top players

The pay-to-win could be probably evitable with nowadays technologies, but in the past servers where way shittier than now. Technologically speaking, it is probably way cheaper to run stuff on a tiny server now, because programming languages advanced a lot, the models of concurrency/parallel programming advanced a lot, because ram is way cheaper, etc …

Cheating

It is hard to stop cheating, even more on browsers given JS is so easy to use there. I don’t know how to really deal with that, I think that cheater are tiny part of anything, probably more among competitive players, I guess you should need a lot of moderators capable of understanding the game and how it plays, and they should parse throughout logs/stats to determine if someone is cheater or not.

Without a PAF system, there is no way you want to do that, if you want a competitive system you indeed need to deal with cheating seriously or else your players will eventually fade overtime.

Outro

I loved these games for so many reasons, it took me way too much time in my life to play them and I sometimes regret it. I definitely think that big studios creating and maintaining them are lazy and at some point wanted to milk them implementing not so necessary systems into these games, instead of creating proper competition and dealing with cheaters/variance correctly.

Also, I think that smartphone killed them too, because of Applications.

But we’re in 2025, and I think the web is stronger than ever before and I believe that it’s more than ready to great new old-style browser RTS (or even other type of mmo browser) games.

Maybe at some point I will want to try one ?

Knowledge

• I’ve modified that article in 2025.
• OGame, Travian, Tribal wars, Kingsage are among the games I remember the most.