All Articles

Going for the Grant

This is big news: Enclave Games was awarded with the Grant for the Web, and we’ll be focusing on Web Monetization in at least the next half a year. Read on if you’re curious how it all happened.

End3r's Corner - Grant for the Web announcement

It was a long journey which started at the W3C workshop about Web Games in June last year, where I was able to travel thanks to the Mozilla Tech Speakers program. I gave a talk about Indie perspective on Web games, which went through the history of HTML5 game development, and ended up with two main issues developers are currently struggling: discoverability and monetization.

Funnily enough, right after that I was approached by Dees, who told me about Web Monetization API. I learned more about it, and got really excited - I do have a long track record of playing around with cutting edge web technologies like Firefox OS, Gamepad API, WebXR, and PWAs before they were publicly usable. It quickly resulted in parnering up with Coil and creating a Web Monetization category in js13kGames 2019.

End3r's Corner - W3C talk

My short talk at the W3C evolved into The past, present, and the future of HTML5 game development presentation which I gave in a few places, including Amsterdam and São Paulo, where I did my first keynote ever. In the meantime, the Grant for the Web program was announced while we were already talking about various ways we could participate.

After the js13kGames competition ended, I teamed up with Chris, Erika, and Christine from Loup Design to showcase Web Monetized games (from both Enclave Games and js13kGames) at the MozFest booth in London, which we called MozFest Arcade. We had so much fun seeing people play the games and realize that the authors of those were earning micro amounts of money in real time for every second the games were played.

End3r's Corner - MozFest team

From then it was all about discussing the details of our involvement with the Grant for the Web, and then working on the actual submission. It evolved a lot over the next few months since the beginning, but I’m super happy with how it ended. We had time to prepare: finish client work, refresh both websites (end3r.com and enclavegames.com), so we can fully focus on the Grant activities when the time comes. And it comes right now!

In the upcoming months we will be busy experimenting with Web Monetization within our own HTML5 game development projects, so if you’re interested in the process itself and the results, be sure to subscribe to Enclave Games’ RSS feed, and follow us on Twitter or Facebook!