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PS3 games in a browser? "We're heading in that direction," says Epic

Gaming could see a major push to PC again with improvements to browser gaming, argues Epic CEO

Tim Sweeney believes that the improvements being made to Unreal Engine, Flash, HTML5 and other systems are driving a push towards better gaming on the PC, specifically through the browser. He believes that in the near future console-quality games will be easily played within a browser.

"We're slowly heading in that direction as an industry," Sweeney told Gamasutra. "You should be able to take any game -- a PlayStation 3 or iOS game, for example -- and just go to that and play it from any web browser."

Epic has been particularly impressed with how far Adobe's Flash has come. Adobe now provides a translator that enables browsers to play games built with Flash-compatible engines, including Epic's Unreal Engine 3.

"You give it any C++ program, like Unreal Engine 3, and it translates it to a platform-independent application that can run within Flash, within any web browser or on any platform where Flash runs," Sweeney continued. "That's an awesome breakthrough; it shows you the possibilities."

"I think the next step in that is cross-compiling games from C++ or whatever and directly running them as native HTML5 and JavaScript applications within any standard web browser."

"In another few years, I think that's going to be a very realistic scenario. And so the web will generally be a platform, and you can have a real application with a full feature set that runs within a web browser; that'll be very welcome," Sweeney said.

Sweeney's latest comments mirror closely what he talked about with us at GDC; Sweeney sees many problems resting in hardware constraints, but being able to play games within a browser could be a potential solution.

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Ben Strauss

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Ben Strauss is a recent graduate of Xavier University. You can see him ramble on about gaming, gamification, military-related gaming and manly things on his Twitter @Sinner101GR.

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