Market Research - Who hates publishing Unity web builds?

TheFuntastic

There no doubt that having a playable web build for you game dramatically increases your chances of exposure, but every time I've uploaded a WebGL build to itch, I've found the process annoyingly frustratingly. Whilst comp G hasn't concluded, I am surprised to see the majority of participants aren't actually using itch, despite strong suggestions in the comp thread (maybe this will change post deadline).

My questions to Unity users are thus:

1. If you think of publishing a WebGL build and tweaking the web page holding your unity content, how do you react?
Whatever? Mild Annoyance? Oh god, anything but that?
2. Would you pay to solve this problem forever?
In particular if the html template was guaranteed to work with your platform of choice. i.e. no weird sizing issues and being compatible with itch fullscreen functionality.
3. Is customizing the loading experience important to you?
i.e. hiding all the unity crap and creating your own loading bar, specifying colours etc.

Thanks!

Edit: hopefully making questions less ambigous

Tuism

1. I used to be a big proponent of web builds, and had built up a really basic workflow to do the holding page - it's really not a huge deal. Wasn't, anyway, until Chrome and the whole ordeal made the web builds sin. Now it's a toss up whether people would even be able to access web builds, and the confusion that a "broken page" gives people makes it not such a good idea anymore. And WebGL just isn't convenient enough yet - huge build time, huge load time, many weird bugs... Now I've kinda just given up and went to downloads by default.

That said, there's a platform problem in itchio that has to do with the layout of the page - web build's layout is inferior to downloadable, in my opinion, in that there's no way to display screenshots. I've fed back as such to them and they've said they'd look at that but I don't see it having been changed yet. Also probably not priority because web builds have been ousted.

2. What level of "guaranteed to work"? On all browsers? With WebGL build? Easily and conveniently for both build and for people to access? Maybe? But being on prototype level I'm not personally convinced in justifying the cost.

3. Not really on a prototype level, which is where in-browser playing is needed most.

dislekcia

1. I'm not sure what the hardships are... Maybe I'm just really used to doing web builds. It just got to the point of me uploading a new unity3d file and changing a single line of code on the site. Seems to me that the real issues are that the webplayer support is spotty, as @Tuism mentioned.

2. Maybe? Depends on the answer to 3.

3. Yes.

TheFuntastic

Thanks for the responses so far. I tried to ask good questions, but seems good research questions are hard! So to clarify:

- This is more specifically to target WebGL. I consider the web player to be dead technology at this point. (Isn't unity dropping support soonish?)
- Guaranteed, as in you can upload to itch.io and the fullscreen button will work and there won't be layout weirdness due to your html css being off. Fixing any Unity specific WebGL weirdness is obviously off the table.

For me the pain comes down to the fact you should ideally be supplying unity with an html template (which you can't preview in a browser), which then overwrites whatever you publish (testing locally, but not in an Iframe), and then has to be uploaded and tested in itch (actually deploy environment with an iframe). Getting this process set up correctly so far has taken me several hours, which is super annoying for the small jam games I publish.