Entity CEO Rich Barnwell says the question is no longer whether Unreal games come to the web, but who will own their distribution.

Epic Games has confirmed that Unreal Engine 5.9 will arrive in Preview next week with the web as a target platform, bringing back a capability the company dropped several years ago.

The move puts Unreal alongside a growing list of major companies investing in browser-based games. Roblox is coming to the web through WebAssembly, Microsoft has pointed to WebAssembly and WebGPU, and Google has launched Playground.

Rich Barnwell, CEO and founder of Entity, which is building a platform for console-calibre games in the browser, said the industry’s biggest players are recognising a new distribution channel.

“The biggest players are recognising that a distribution channel is appearing on the web that they have to take seriously,” Barnwell said. “Unreal games coming to the web is happening now, so what comes next is where those games will live and who will own the distribution.”

Early builds expected to be rough

Barnwell cautioned that the first Unreal web builds are unlikely to be smooth. “Web is a demanding target for an engine as large as Unreal, so the early builds will have plenty of rough edges,” he said. “Asset streaming and memory management are the big hurdles, which means some games will hit rendering problems and others won’t be possible at first.”

He added that he expects these issues to be “solvable in the near future, but there is a lot to work through.”

A signal of Epic’s commitment

According to Barnwell, Epic’s decision to rebuild web export points to real confidence in the channel. “Putting it back means a lot of engineering effort that you wouldn’t take on unless you thought the channel was worth it,” he said. “An engine that exports for the web does the heavy lifting on porting, which makes the work that still has to be done dramatically easier and faster.”

Demand already exists

Barnwell pointed to unofficial browser versions of commercial games as evidence that players want this. “The demand is there and people want to play these games,” he said. “Console-calibre games need the engines behind them, and with Unreal, one of the last big dominoes, having just fallen, we’re building the official, legitimate distribution channel for them at Entity.”

Entity works with developers and publishers to port titles from their source code to the browser. The company was founded by the team behind DIGIT, developer of Star Trek Fleet Command, which Scopely acquired in 2019, and recently closed a €5 million seed round.