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

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.