On the other hand i hope he's wrong because that means games can die at the whim of whoever hosts the servers (they already have tons of issues with DRM and such). Personally i prefer to have control over when and where the games (and other software) i have are installed and i prefer to buy games from GOG and other DRM-free places (that give me an offline installer i can place on my external hard drive) whenever possible, but comparing the popularity between GOG and Steam with developers and publishers tells me that if the option for them to take even more control away from the consumers is there, the vast majority of them will go full on it.
This loss of control over the software i use is my main annoyance by far as a user when it comes to the trend of pushing everything as a web app.
Oh, I completely agree with your sentiment but I don't think that means it has to be hosted remotely. No reason you shouldn't be able to download a packaged web binary to run locally. I wonder if webassembly supports that notion or not?
There isn't really a reason to offer a game as a web application if the goal isn't to have it run inside the web browser though. As i wrote in the other reply, i'm not worried about the best thing to do that is technically possible with the method, but what is the most likely to happen (assuming publishing games as web applications take off in the first place, of course).
Assuming the game had no server component beyond the distribution itself (i.e. no online multiplayer or similar) there's no reason you couldn't just save the distributed files and open them in an appropriate client (namely wasm-friendly browsers as of right now).
How many web applications do you know that do that, especially compared to those that do not? I'm not worried about what is the best one can do, but what is the most likely.
This loss of control over the software i use is my main annoyance by far as a user when it comes to the trend of pushing everything as a web app.