Opera bought Game Maker to form the basis of Opera Gaming

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Opera bought Game Maker to form the basis of Opera GamingPairing it with their gaming browser

Pairing it with their gaming browser

This is corporate stuff, but it’s not uninteresting.Opera GXis a browser designed with gaming in mind. It has Twitch and Discord integration, resource limiters to stop tabs from hogging CPU or RAM while you’re playing a game, and a few other features that, if I’m honest, sound unnecessary to me. It’s currently got 7 million monthly active users though, according to Opera.

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Opera’s press release also talk about the opportunity for turning “the Opera GX vertical into a new kind of horizontal. This horizontal opportunity is why we’re building Opera Gaming and its infrastructure - so that we can further integrate gaming and browsing in ways beneficial to both in terms of not only monetization, but also experience.”

Corporate speak aside, it sounds as if the two software will be directly integrated. I can imagine Opera GX having a built-in store where people can buy games, and where those games that are made in Game Maker can run directly inside the browser.

I’m not sure I find that possibility particularly interesting, given the existing abundance of venues to buy and play games. I can’t see myself switching browser any time soon, or wanting a browser dedicated to a specialist purpose.

That could change in time.Flash might have finally been killed for good, but there’s now HTML5 and myriad cloud gaming and streaming options that allow people to play games without an installer. It remains a somehat distant future, but it’s a scenario where I can imagine the browser’s performance being newly vital.

For now, I remain simply nervous for what this means for the core of Game Maker: Studio 2, and all the many developers that use it.