I'll try to elaborate a bit more on https://twitter.com/matti_sg/status/522103990373588992 and explain why the Humble Mozilla Bundle is such a noticeable event.
Let's recap what's happening: a non-profit (Mozilla) partners with an indie promotion platform (HumbleBundle) to promote its free open-source tech (asm.js and Firefox). It uses all its communication power for this (social accounts but, more importantly, the Firefox start page that morphs into a game itself). Private, independent actors (the game creators and HumbleBundle) benefit from this, the non-profit does too (portions of the bundle price go back to Mozilla), and most of all the union of such big actors proves the platform can deliver the promise.
Mozilla had done several demos of HTML5 + WebGL + asm.js being a proper platform for gaming in terms of performance (IE did too).
But using this specific set of actors puts it in very different terms. It is not a demo. These are “real” games, not developer playgrounds, and here they are in your browser. Just click on a button and you can play them.
So, this proves:
- The power and maturity of the web, far beyond the tech circle. I don't know exactly how many people will discover what can happen in their browsers, but more than any tech demo would have brought.
- Libre actors can shake (I can't say "disrupt" for the moment, we'll see what comes out of this later on) a market and make money out of it.
Which means it is a good time to be a web developer. And we are moving closer again towards a recognition of sustainable open-source models.