📜 The Thesis of the Multiplayer Web
The Web Was Built as Single-Player
When the web emerged in the 1990s, it inherited a single-user mental model. A browser window was designed for one person, one screen, one mouse. Pages loaded, and you consumed them in solitude.
That model worked when the web was mostly about reading documents. But today the web is about doing things together: shopping, learning, playing, building, deciding. The single-player browser is a misfit for a multiplayer world.
The Gap Between Experience and Reality
You shop for flights with friends - but end up copying links into group chats.
You ask a colleague for help - and fall back to clunky screen shares.
You learn together - but each person’s browser is an isolated island.
The web fakes collaboration through screenshots, screen shares, and endless links. This is friction we’ve normalized, but it is not inevitable.
Multiplayer is a Primitive, Not a Plugin
True multiplayer is not an app feature bolted on top - it’s a capability of the medium itself, like hyperlinks or forms. When presence, co-navigation, and shared intent are native to the browser, entirely new classes of experiences emerge:
Multiplayer checkout (split, stack, delegate payments in real time).
Multiplayer support (agents guiding you live on the page).
Multiplayer learning (co-highlighting, following, annotating).
Multiplayer discovery (friends exploring new products or media together).
Just as the hyperlink unlocked the Web 1.0 and AJAX unlocked Web 2.0, multiplayer primitives unlock the next stage of the web’s evolution.
From De-Facto to De-Jure
Every great web shift starts in practice:
JavaScript was a hack before it was a standard.
WebSockets began as libraries before W3C adoption.
WebRTC was pushed by early video apps before browsers made it native.
Multiplayer is following the same trajectory. The first implementations may be extensions, SDKs, and overlays. But once users and developers can’t imagine the web without it, multiplayer will become a standard primitive.
Why Now?
Cultural: Gen Z and Alpha already treat everything as multiplayer - gaming, streaming, social. The expectation is default togetherness.
Technical: Real-time transport (WebRTC/WebTransport), cheap cloud infra, and standard testing harnesses (Web Platform Tests) make it feasible.
Economic: Commerce, education, and support industries bleed billions due to the friction of single-player browsing.
The demand, infrastructure, and mindset are aligned. The timing is right.
The Thesis in One Sentence
Yash K
Yash Kotak