HTML5 games may not be as popular as their triple-A counterparts, but that doesn’t stop developers from making some damn good games on a web browser. Unfortunately, developers of these games have now hit a snag and it’s all thanks to Google Chrome’s latest update.
Google hasn’t been a big fan of individuals who use ad blockers, and so, in their efforts to further discourage the use of them, they have altered their policy to automatically mute audio by default. On the surface, it seems like a harmless change, especially as there is a way around if an individual wants the sound to be on autoplay regardless.
But the change has left more than a few glaring mistakes that have affected HTML5 games and their developers. Understandably this left many unhappy, including VVVVV creator Terry Cavanagh and Stephen’s Sausage Roll developer, Stephen Lavelle. Check out their tweets below.
Ah fuuck sake. I had just in the last year started to begin to trust that I could reliably use audio in the browser (after years of reticence). So much for that…looks like the chrome update broke all of the audio in my html5 games as well. https://t.co/gT6n9pz0VT
— Stephen Lavelle (@increpare) May 7, 2018
There have been attempts from former Kickstarter CTO Andy Biao to bring this to the attention of the official Twitter account for the Google Chrome development team, Chromium Dev. However, at the time of writing this article, there has bee no response from the Chromium Dev team that shows they have acknowledged the issue.
Biao also notes that Google’s own projects have not been affected whatsoever by the audio issue, leaving a rather telling story that isn’t hard to figure out.
Thankfully the popular indie game portal, Itch.io, has notified those who may be struggling with the new update that their ‘click to play’ option resolves the issue. Unfortunately this does not include those who do not use the platform.
Are you suffering thanks to Google Chrome’s update? Let us know in the comments below.
