Google Chrome temporarily rolls back autoplay policy for web games

Google’s Chrome 66 update in April came with a touted feature that prevents video and audio from autoplaying in its web browser. However, this has harmed indie developers who create HTML5 games — the new policy broke a lot of web games, forcing some designers to consider taking down their entire portfolio of dozens of titles. In response to the outcry about the autoplay policy, Google Chrome boss John Pallett posted in a forum yesterday that it will temporarily disable the part that is affecting web games. The policy will be reimplemented in October with the Chrome 70 update.

“We’ve updated Chrome 66 to temporarily remove the autoplay policy for the Web Audio API. This change does not affect most media playback on the web, as the autoplay policy will remain in effect for <video> and <audio>,” wrote Pallett on a message board where users can submit Chromium bugs. “We’re doing this to give Web Audio API developers (e.g., gaming, audio applications, some RTC features) more time to update their code. The team here is working hard to improve things for users and developers, but in this case we didn’t do a good job of communicating the impact of the new autoplay policy to developers using the Web Audio API.”