
While that’s not a trivial drop in traffic, it’s nowhere near the 65% browser market share of Chrome, supporting the idea that most players were willing to change browser settings or switch browsers entirely Overall between the two periods, there's about a 12.6% drop in average daily unique users. There is a noticeable drop in traffic around then, and while it starts a couple of weeks before Chrome 42 is actually released, traffic never fully recovers. The first line shows when Chrome 42 launched (April 14th, 2015), which was the first release to turn off support for NPAPI plugins by default (though players could dive into Chrome’s settings to turn it back on). This first graph shows the aggregated weekly gameplays for a handful of our most popular Unity Web Player-only games over the past year. So, are players willing to jump through some hoops in order to play the game they wanted to play, or has the Chrome removal of NPAPI cut off a large part of Unity's audience? Here's a breakdown of the traffic coming to a handful of our top Unity games on Kongregate:
#Unity web player plugin google chrome download
Then, when NPAPI support was taken away by default, we started showing a notification that Chrome had ended support for the player, and a link to download Firefox in order to run the game. When the first phase of the takedown happened and Chrome blocked NPAPI plugins from running on the page by default, we showed users how they could re-enable the Web Player. In order to prepare both developers and users for the transition, we started a campaign educating them about Chrome disabling NPAPI support months before it was removed. That said, we have had an extremely high adoption rate of the Unity Web Player on Kongregate (97% of repeat users have the plugin installed), so our theory was that players wouldn't mind having to switch to another browser to play a Web Player game. While we wait for the remaining improvements of the technology across all browsers, a question remains: Is there still enough of an audience on web using Unity Web Player-compatible browsers? Chrome continues to grow in popularity, with 70% of the market share currently, similar to what we see on Kongregate.

The WebGL export is still in development, as performance is still being improved and kinks are being worked out, but it has come a long way. Some games have had very little trouble using the new export, while others are running into some bigger problems due to the limitations of the platform. It had been in preview mode up until it fully released in Unity 5.3 on December 8th, 2015, and we're starting to see more and more games on Kongregate being uploaded using the WebGL builds. Unity's solution to this is in Unity 5, which includes an option to export games to a plugin-less WebGL format. If you're reading this, you probably either already have a Unity game up on web, or are considering launching one, but aren't sure if the traffic exists to support your studio. This has been a worry for developers who are depending on Unity working in browsers to sustain themselves. Microsoft's new Edge browser also doesn't support these plugins, and Mozilla recently announced that it will be dropping plugins (with the exception of Flash) as well at the end of 2016.īecause Unity's Web Player uses NPAPI tech to run in browsers, all Unity games no longer load when opened in Chrome. Skipping ahead a bit, Chrome version 45 launched on September 1st of last year, removing support for NPAPI plugins. Back in 2013, Chrome announced that it would be dropping support for the Netscape Plug-in API (NPAPI) due to concerns about the browser's security, speed, and stability.

While browser games remain a popular format for game development, the technology behind browser games has been changing quickly over the past few years.
