Back in the day, when the internet was still young and innocent, a new development platform hit the market. With a well-sounding name – Macromedia Flash – and easy to learn, it has become the go-to game development platform. Thousands, if not millions of browser games were created back then. Most browser games were simple, colorful, and entertaining back then. Later, though, they started evolving, making use of hardware acceleration and the ever-growing processing power of the computers. Today’s browser games – especially those built in Flash – require a much stronger PC than you might imagine.

Social games on the desktop

Let me tell you this from my own experience: Candy Crush doesn’t behave appropriately on a dual-core CPU, with 3GB of RAM, and a dated nVidia graphics card. The configuration that easily handles Half-Life 2 is choking under the pressure of a simple reactor game running inside Facebook on a desktop browser. Whether it’s the game that’s under-optimized or the hardware that’s too old for today’s gaming needs, it’s hard to tell. Flash games are slowly dying anyway – Candy Crush itself thrives on smartphones rather than desktops these days.

While there are no minimum system requirements posted for Flash games today (they usually only require Flash Player to be installed on the PC), it’s safe to state that a quad-core CPU, a rather advanced GPU, and a ton of RAM are needed to run most of today’s browser games at their best.

Browser games on smartphones

HTML5 is slowly becoming the new norm, a go-to standard for browser games. While it’s harder to deploy on third-party websites, it offers a smoother operation on smartphones and desktop computers alike – and some branches of the gaming industry require just that.

The Vegas Palms is a gaming operator that doesn’t rely on in-app purchases and ads to generate its revenues. Instead, Vegas Palms players play its games using real money – for the chance of winning real money. Thus, the interest of the Vegas Palms is to reach as many players as it can, on all platforms, no matter what operating system – or hardware configuration – they might use.

The efforts of the Vegas Palms have led to the launch of a mobile browser gaming platform that runs on all operating systems (with an HTML5 capable browser), and the vast majority of hardware configurations out there. And when you try them on desktop computers, you’ll see that they provide the same experience than Flash games, only with much lower hardware expectations.

The best thing about HTML5 is that it’s not a proprietary development platform, but a standard that the majority of web browsers support today. This means that it doesn’t need a plugin to run, like Flash or Unity, thus it can be deployed on an incredible variety of devices, from gaming consoles to smart TVs.