On November 26th, after a few long months, we’ve returned with the W3C Games Community Group meetup and had GameSnacks talking about discovery , distribution , and monetisation.

This was somewhat a follow-up to the discussion we had a few years back about Open Mini Games proposed by Tom Greenaway. At the recent meetup we had Andrew Gildfind from Google , a product manager for GameSnacks handling HTML5 ads for games, who was presenting about their platform. Tom Greenaway , AI and Games advocate at Google (and also W3C Games CG chair) was leading the discussion around the future of discovery, distribution, and monetisation.

At the meetup we had folks from the publishers side like Poki and CrazyGames , but also the game engines side with Phaser and Defold , and game developers (me representing Enclave Games among others) as well. We all agreed that we should investigate formalizing Open Mini Games Format into an API ⁄ SDK all parties could start using.

The Open Mini Games (OMG) format is a proposal to define a set of combined minimum requirements that game developers can implement when developing a game that is playable in a web browser or a client which renders HTML5 content. The aim of the requirements is to provide the information necessary to surface a web game in a standardized manner on discovery platforms such as browsers but also embedded platforms.

You can watch the recorded video of the presentation along with captions, transcript, and meeting notes here. We’ll most probably start with an MVP ⁄ prototype first, and work from there during our regular W3C Games Community Group meetups.

We’ve also discussed internally if we should update the current group’s charter, create a new one, or place the idea in a W3C incubator, with the option of creating a new one with interested parties joining in probably being the best for now. With “W3C Games Working Group” we could actually specify the work needed to be done to create a formal standard.

We do plan to have another W3C Games CG meetup in January to keep the momentum going and discuss the next steps.