Landscape or portrait mode for html5 game

[Soley]

Hello,

I would like to know which screen orientation is more in demand for html5 browser/mobile games?

 

[mattstyles]

Depends on the type of game.

If you rely on keyboard input then you're likely targeting laptops/desktops, so landscape.

If you're targeting mobiles then portrait as web landscape is pretty poor in most mobile browsers and you can't lock the orientation for the web (this restriction doesn't apply if you're embedding your web tech into something like Cordova and releasing your app as a "native" application).

I'd guess mobile market is larger, but, it does depend on the type of game.

[Gio]

Just to expand on mattstyles's answer, while it's true that you can't lock orientation for a web page, it's fairly easy to force a particular orientation by applying a css transform when width < height (or the either way around). Some js frameworks come with this feature out of the box, with some others you have to do it yourself - but even then, it's usually pretty simple.

Now whether you actually want to do that, is an entirely different matter. On a phone with a 2:1 aspect ratio, the address bar in landscape mode takes up a significant portion of the screen, so unless you go full-screen it can be pretty annoying. Much less so in portrait mode.

In general though, I think it depends on the game. Some types of games work better in landscape (rpg, strategy, etc), some others work better in prortrait (space shooter, match-3, pinball, etc).

[b10b]

We've been locking orientation (and auto enabling fullscreen) on the web for years (while accepting it doesn't work in Safari or older Android stock browsers) - see 'window.screen' API.  Games look great in landscape, especially so for desktop, where (according to our web stats) most browser games are still played.  If targeting a particular mobile platform (e.g. Facebook Instant Games) then portrait may fit better to the users' existing habits - and that's the important part of the choice, make things work as the user expects them to.

 

 

[mattstyles]

1 hour ago, b10b said:

We've been locking orientation (and auto enabling fullscreen) on the web for years

I'd totally forgotten about that API! Such a shame it doesn't have decent browser coverage, still, if your demographic are all Android Chrome users you're laughing!