A friend asked me last week why he should bother building his next game in HTML5 when Unity exports to WebGL and Godot ships a web target and even Bevy has a wasm pipeline now. Why pick the messier toolchain. Why fight Canvas/WebGL/WebGPU directly when an engine handles it. Long story. I've been writing browser games on and off since maybe 2014 — first in Phaser 2, later in 3, with a handful of PixiJS detours when I wanted to feel like a real graphics person. I gave him a probably-too-long answer over coffee and then realized I should just put the thing in writing. The short version: HTML5 games are having a moment that nobody is really talking about, and the reasons are mostly boring ones. Performance got fixed. Distribution got harder. Mobile stores got worse. Browsers got better. The story isn't a single dramatic shift; it's six small ones that compounded. The Chrome bottleneck dissolved If you remember writing a Canvas game in 2017, you remember frame drops you couldn't explain.…