The Chrome autoplay ban has a great impact on web game developers and their work
Many people have blamed autoplay videos in Chrome for disturbing their browsing experience. As a result, Google decided to block them and make everyone happy. However, this also had some unexpected consequences that got on the nerves of some web game developers, as it disables their audio as well.
Google took immediate action against autoplay videos
Ads have become more and more invasive over time, with many of them starting to play annoying sounds whenever you accessed a webpage. After receiving hundreds of complaints, Google decided to roll out some updates. These automatically block the audio components whenever you open a new page.
At first, everyone welcomed the changes. However, they turned out not to have quite the expected effect. This feature blocks any kind of audio on a webpage, so it disturbed the sounds and music in web games. It can be really annoying, especially when audio is an important component of the web game. While this is bugging developers, it’s getting on the nerves of players as well, since they cannot enjoy the complete experience of the game.
This attempt caused a lot of trouble for web game developers
Now, developers are having a hard time fixing the web game audio problem. They have to change all their games and make the sound work. To do this, they have to wait until the user makes a gesture showing they want to start playing the game. Afterwards, they can restart the audio features and regain the sound in the web game.
Google’s attempt to stop autoplay videos seeks to make the web a friendlier place for everyone. Therefore, its new policies claim a user gesture isn’t enough to allow a video to play automatically. This sounds great for users, but it makes things more dire for both advertisers and developers.
However, the company decided to still allow sound on certain webpages. In case of a web game, users usually enable sound. Google will put up a list of pages where users usually don’t disable the sound features and it will allow the audio to play there.
Still feeling revolted by @ChromiumDev and @googlechrome unilaterally deciding to silence thousands upon thousands of historical videogames on the web. Their last tweet suggests they have no intention of changing course…Just ruining our work, destroying our cultural heritage.
— Bennett (@bfod) May 8, 2018
Image source: Pexels
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