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People said Flash wouldn't be missed. People said WebGL and canvas would bring us a much better experience. It's been nearly a decade since Steve Jobs declared

People said Flash wouldn't be missed. People said WebGL and canvas would bring us a much better experience. It's been nearly a decade since Steve Jobs declared war on Flash. Where has the entire browser gaming ecosystem gone to? Kongregate had some of the most original games I've ever played. Kongregate shutting down doesn't just sadden me, it infuriates me: all vendors had to do was to sandbox Flash (which Chrome did!) and not autoplay it. Instead everyone followed the lead of an arrogant jerk who obviously knew everything better than everyone. Communities like Kongregate, Armorgames, Newgrounds will never exist again. There will never be another War of the Web.

aaomidi 6y ago
Flash was absolutely atrocious from a technical standpoint. It had to go. We had to adapt to better things. It's not that webgl isn't capable. It's that the market for in browser flash like games has diminished when you can now play AAA games in the browser. The market has changed. And sadly that doesn't mean every single person doesn't want them anymore. Just that the majority don't.
- devwastaken 6y ago
  It was atrocious but there was much better tooling behind it that made it all make sense. I just wish flash would have been stripped down into a web only version that was safe and only for things like flash games.
- Octopodes 6y ago
  >It had to go. We had to adapt to better things. I'm sorry, I don't understand why. If someone develops a fun little game in Flash, and then I play it on Kongregate, what harm has been done?
  - somethingwitty1 6y ago
    Because flash was a plugin, not locked to that one little game. Once you install it, every website could use it. A lot was done, by browsers, over the years to try and give more control to the end-user, but Adobe didn't have too much interest. They were the dominate player, what other option was there!? Countless security vulnerabilities (https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/product_id-6761/Adobe-Flash-Player.html https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/p...), siphoning personal data back to Adobe, etc. Looking today at what some companies are doing to harvest data, one could say they were just ahead of their time...
- andybak 6y ago
  > Flash was absolutely atrocious from a technical standpoint. Flash the runtime? Flash the browser plugin? Flash the authoring environment? Actionscript the language? Not all of this stuff needed to be dumped. And not all of it has been replaced by something that can measure up to what was lost. Some of
  - Izkata 6y ago
    Your train of thought seems to have fallen into a black hole.
    - dang 6y ago
      Personal attacks aren't allowed on HN, regardless of someone else's train of thought. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
      - Izkata 6y ago
        Wait, what? There's no attack there, it was just a funny way of mentioning they seemed to hit post before finishing a sentence - there's even a space after it like they planned on typing more words: > Some of
        dang 6y ago
        Ok, I see now. It read like an insult but I see your point. Sorry!
    - mtrower 6y ago
      Judging by the downvotes, I'd guess a lot of people misunderstood you. Well, you made my day, at least =)
- ckocagil 6y ago
  What was atrocious about Flash? AS3 was a decent language. Better, more open tools were coming along. Insecurity and privacy concerns were addressed by properly sandboxing it. The biggest downside of Flash is that it wasn't an open web technology, but the answer to that shouldn't have been to remove it before an open alternative was established. All in all I don't see what all that fuss was about. If WebGL and Flash competed on an equal footing the WebGL tools (including Flash-like, newbie-friendly frameworks) would be forced to get better than Flash.
  - virgil_disgr4ce 6y ago
    I'm relieved I'm not the only one who thought AS3 was decent. It had the structure of Java without the absurdities of Java (first-class functions always come to mind immediately).
  - nemothekid 6y ago
    >but the answer to that shouldn't have been to remove it before an open alternative was established An open alternative was available - HTML5 games were possible before Chrome started disabling Flash by default. Smartphones and social media really killed the market for online browser games - you really don't seem them anymore other than .io games. For anyone developing games, the return is far greater in the app store vs. online. Ad Revenue, if your name isn't Google/Facebook is a joke. I can't imagine why anyone would develop a browser game today when the App Store exists.
    - jack1243star 6y ago
      For artistic expression? I know plenty of Flash games that are not for-profit at all. Small interactive toys hosted on personal homepages.
      - nemothekid 6y ago
        Sure, but that ignores the reason why sites like Newgrounds had the massive library they did, you could get paid to put your content on newgrounds because you got a slice of the ad revenue. Massive games libraries like Newgrounds didn’t exist for solely for artistic expression
- mustacheemperor 6y ago
  I think the prospects for an 11 year old hacker creating their first game with art, programmed behaviors etc, were much higher on Flash in 2006 than on WebGL in 2020.
  - david-s 6y ago
    you should probably be comparing Flash to the wide variety of engines and tools that can release to HTML5 rather than to raw WebGL
  - hoistbypetard 6y ago
    I disagree. Godot, Unity and Construct are all examples of tools that are both easier to learn and less costly in 2020 than Flash authoring tools were in 2006. They export HTML5/WebGL games that can be hosted for free in a few clicks on itch.io. I think the prospects for an 11 year old hacker creating their first game with unity or godot are much higher than they were in 2006 with flash. Look at the submissions for any itch.io 48 hour game jam and see how many of them are playable on the web, and created by people with very little experience. These prospects have moved to places where they're more accessible, not disappeared. Here's an example where 1158 web entries were created in a weekend. https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/entries https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/entries For a jam with no prizes.
    - chrisco255 6y ago
      Thank you, I feel like Itch.io should be featured on the main thread on HN. I didn't know about its existence.
    - dicytea 6y ago
      Yep, there hasn't been a better and easier time to make your own homemade games than today. People who deeply laments for the Flash era are simply not looking at the right places.
    - Mirioron 6y ago
      >Godot, Unity and Construct are all examples of tools that are both easier to learn and less costly in 2020 than Flash authoring tools were in 2006. I don't think this is true at all. Making something in Flash and publishing it even back then was easier to me than to use Unity or Godot today. The latter two tools are much more powerful, but way more complex. Also, you linked a game maker's toolkit gamejam. Of course they're going to be playable in the browser. I would consider that to he easier to use (or at least on par) than Flash.
marshray 6y ago
Adobe had a decade or more to show that they could develop a secure browser plugin. They couldn't do it, or decided their resources were better spent elsewhere. If you don't want to maintain a small army of full-time security staff, you can't ship binary code running untrusted data-as-programs on billions of consumer devices. Full stop.
- etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
  Sandboxing turned out to be a good answer. I don't know why we don't just implement Flash in WebAssembly and be done with it. It can still be built-in to web browsers.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    It's being done: https://leaningtech.com/pages/cheerpx.html https://leaningtech.com/pages/cheerpx.html
    - etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
      In fact, it's probably possible to recompile x86 Flash to webassembly and run the real thing...
    - apignotti 6y ago
      Hello! Author of the tool here, if anybody has questions I am available on Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexpignotti https://twitter.com/alexpignotti
- agrippanux 6y ago
  Adobe didn’t want to continue to support Flash. I know this because their office was across the street from Zynga’s and they came over and told us (I was running a team at the time doing experimental HTML5 games). Their plan was to move to Air and they hyped the crap out of it to us. Much effort was put into Air research and development. As a result, Zynga IPOd with a ton of huge web games in the pipeline with the theory we could cross compile with Air. This was a massive mistake and Supercell and King quickly dominated us while the next few years were spent catching up on mobile gaming.
sp332 6y ago
July 2017 - HTML5 games account for more than 50% of all new games uploaded to Kongregate and almost 50% of the revenue. https://blog.kongregate.com/html5-is-here/ https://blog.kongregate.com/html5-is-here/
- ckocagil 6y ago
  50% doesn't mean much when the website itself loses its relevance: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=kongregate https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=kongrega...
  - madeofpalk 6y ago
    Maybe just no one wants the website any more?
  - ed312 6y ago
    Wow, they all trend the exact same way. End of an era, but sadly missed.
  - thearchitect1 6y ago
    Jesus, thats pretty sad. Rip kongerate you will be missed o7
hombre_fatal 6y ago
You're really barking up the wrong tree here. What this news really means is that how people are using the web is changing. When I was younger, browser games were the only real way to play games without spending money or having my parents buy me a Gameboy (which they never did). I could get on Newgrounds from any PC at school, it was a big part of my life. These days, every one of Kongregate's users has a smartphone with free games more accessible and convenient than the old browser gaming model. I run an internet writing forum that has also suffered over the years despite being a relatively massive forum in its hey day. What changed? I think these are just the affects of the smartphone era. And the centralization of social media, in my case. People just don't go to Kongregate anymore, the hey day is over. And it's not because of Flash/HTML5 -- it's not like users in droves are even thinking about that. Kongregate has to somehow compete with kids playing Fortnite on their iPhone before class for free. Times are changing.
- GuiA 6y ago
  > I run an internet writing forum that has also suffered over the years despite being a relatively massive forum in its hey day. What changed? I think these are just the affects of the smartphone era. I wonder what the phpBB of social media/smartphone apps would look like.
  - camgunz 6y ago
    Instagram
    - Gigablah 6y ago
      As someone who runs a vBulletin forum, seems like Discord is the rage nowadays.
      - Apocryphon 6y ago
        Thing is, Discord is a chatroom, and chat and forums are fundamentally different. Realtime vs. slightly less constant. Forums produce less of a flood. More easily searchable, allowing quote replies (something Slack has Discord doesn't). Forums might be old-school, but I find them eminently more readable than commercialized chatrooms like Discord or Slack. And they allow for more powerful discussions than quasi-BBS like Reddit or Hacker News.
Riverheart 6y ago
Agreed. I've played free flash games on Kongregate that were better quality and more original than many things you'll pay for on Steam. That said, I've been pleased to find Don't Escape and Deep Sleep on Steam and it's nice to give back. Wish more creators would do that.
azhenley 6y ago
In college I made a living from releasing Flash games that I made during the weekends. Nothing has matched the ease of distributing a Flash game. My games would spread to hundreds of websites with video advertisements in them.
clusterfish 6y ago
It went into mobile apps. The browser part didn't matter to most people. So now we have walled gardens.
nabilhat 6y ago
Flash is about more than just games, musicals featuring Colin Mochrie, and documentaries about badgers and mushrooms. Flash has lasting anthropological significance. Some of the kids who grew up tinkering with Flash grew into structural roles and helped build the internet as we know it today. Others sequestered the interests that got kicked off of the mainstream into petri dish crevices of the internet such as the early days of 4chan.
- mtrower 6y ago
  > documentaries about badgers and mushrooms Documentaries about snakes, as well? In all seriousness, you make a reasonable argument, but tinkering existed well before the age of Flash. Now, won't something else fill the role?
thedirt0115 6y ago
I too miss Flash games, but there are still tons and tons of free indie games on the web. Have you checked out itch.io, for example? There are ~90k free HTML5 games [1]. [1]: https://itch.io/games/html5 https://itch.io/games/html5
awscherb 6y ago
Kongregate, what a trip. I saw 'Kongregate' in the title and thought 'hey, I have games published there!' As a teenager, using MochiAds to get paid for some flash games was absurd - this was something I was just "good at", and honestly, what really introduced me to software development as both a passion and a career.
biryani_chicken 6y ago
We now have DOS emulators in the browser[0]. Do that with Flash! [0] https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games
dmix 6y ago
> all vendors had to do was to sandbox Flash If only browser security was so simple.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
> Where has the entire browser gaming ecosystem gone to? https://itch.io/ https://itch.io/, basically. There's also the Pico-8 gaming ecosystem which has some really great concepts built with the platform's constraints: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
musicale 6y ago
I think Jobs was right about Flash, but you are also right about Flash; the browser game ecosystem was nice. Several key aspects of Flash, 90s web, Hypercard and other technologies that sustained creative enthusiast ecosystems seem to have been low barrier to entry, easy sharing and discovery, and a lack of obvious alternatives for a large pool of creators and users. Those things are hard to (re)create. On the other hand, demoscene shows no signs of dying as far as I can tell. The app economy is huge and locks in creators and users, but it has high barriers to entry as well as poor discovery and very limited sharing locked down by the platform owner. There seem to be many easy-to-use game engines, as well as sites for web games, but that's part of the problem - there isn't the concentration of interest in one class of games or an easy way to share them across sites.

aaomidi 6y ago

Flash was absolutely atrocious from a technical standpoint. It had to go. We had to adapt to better things. It's not that webgl isn't capable. It's that the market for in browser flash like games has diminished when you can now play AAA games in the browser. The market has changed. And sadly that doesn't mean every single person doesn't want them anymore. Just that the majority don't.

devwastaken 6y ago
It was atrocious but there was much better tooling behind it that made it all make sense. I just wish flash would have been stripped down into a web only version that was safe and only for things like flash games.
Octopodes 6y ago
>It had to go. We had to adapt to better things. I'm sorry, I don't understand why. If someone develops a fun little game in Flash, and then I play it on Kongregate, what harm has been done?
- somethingwitty1 6y ago
  Because flash was a plugin, not locked to that one little game. Once you install it, every website could use it. A lot was done, by browsers, over the years to try and give more control to the end-user, but Adobe didn't have too much interest. They were the dominate player, what other option was there!? Countless security vulnerabilities (https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/product_id-6761/Adobe-Flash-Player.html https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/p...), siphoning personal data back to Adobe, etc. Looking today at what some companies are doing to harvest data, one could say they were just ahead of their time...
andybak 6y ago
> Flash was absolutely atrocious from a technical standpoint. Flash the runtime? Flash the browser plugin? Flash the authoring environment? Actionscript the language? Not all of this stuff needed to be dumped. And not all of it has been replaced by something that can measure up to what was lost. Some of
- Izkata 6y ago
  Your train of thought seems to have fallen into a black hole.
  - dang 6y ago
    Personal attacks aren't allowed on HN, regardless of someone else's train of thought. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
    - Izkata 6y ago
      Wait, what? There's no attack there, it was just a funny way of mentioning they seemed to hit post before finishing a sentence - there's even a space after it like they planned on typing more words: > Some of
      - dang 6y ago
        Ok, I see now. It read like an insult but I see your point. Sorry!
  - mtrower 6y ago
    Judging by the downvotes, I'd guess a lot of people misunderstood you. Well, you made my day, at least =)
ckocagil 6y ago
What was atrocious about Flash? AS3 was a decent language. Better, more open tools were coming along. Insecurity and privacy concerns were addressed by properly sandboxing it. The biggest downside of Flash is that it wasn't an open web technology, but the answer to that shouldn't have been to remove it before an open alternative was established. All in all I don't see what all that fuss was about. If WebGL and Flash competed on an equal footing the WebGL tools (including Flash-like, newbie-friendly frameworks) would be forced to get better than Flash.
- virgil_disgr4ce 6y ago
  I'm relieved I'm not the only one who thought AS3 was decent. It had the structure of Java without the absurdities of Java (first-class functions always come to mind immediately).
- nemothekid 6y ago
  >but the answer to that shouldn't have been to remove it before an open alternative was established An open alternative was available - HTML5 games were possible before Chrome started disabling Flash by default. Smartphones and social media really killed the market for online browser games - you really don't seem them anymore other than .io games. For anyone developing games, the return is far greater in the app store vs. online. Ad Revenue, if your name isn't Google/Facebook is a joke. I can't imagine why anyone would develop a browser game today when the App Store exists.
  - jack1243star 6y ago
    For artistic expression? I know plenty of Flash games that are not for-profit at all. Small interactive toys hosted on personal homepages.
    - nemothekid 6y ago
      Sure, but that ignores the reason why sites like Newgrounds had the massive library they did, you could get paid to put your content on newgrounds because you got a slice of the ad revenue. Massive games libraries like Newgrounds didn’t exist for solely for artistic expression
mustacheemperor 6y ago
I think the prospects for an 11 year old hacker creating their first game with art, programmed behaviors etc, were much higher on Flash in 2006 than on WebGL in 2020.
- david-s 6y ago
  you should probably be comparing Flash to the wide variety of engines and tools that can release to HTML5 rather than to raw WebGL
- hoistbypetard 6y ago
  I disagree. Godot, Unity and Construct are all examples of tools that are both easier to learn and less costly in 2020 than Flash authoring tools were in 2006. They export HTML5/WebGL games that can be hosted for free in a few clicks on itch.io. I think the prospects for an 11 year old hacker creating their first game with unity or godot are much higher than they were in 2006 with flash. Look at the submissions for any itch.io 48 hour game jam and see how many of them are playable on the web, and created by people with very little experience. These prospects have moved to places where they're more accessible, not disappeared. Here's an example where 1158 web entries were created in a weekend. https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/entries https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/entries For a jam with no prizes.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    Thank you, I feel like Itch.io should be featured on the main thread on HN. I didn't know about its existence.
  - dicytea 6y ago
    Yep, there hasn't been a better and easier time to make your own homemade games than today. People who deeply laments for the Flash era are simply not looking at the right places.
  - Mirioron 6y ago
    >Godot, Unity and Construct are all examples of tools that are both easier to learn and less costly in 2020 than Flash authoring tools were in 2006. I don't think this is true at all. Making something in Flash and publishing it even back then was easier to me than to use Unity or Godot today. The latter two tools are much more powerful, but way more complex. Also, you linked a game maker's toolkit gamejam. Of course they're going to be playable in the browser. I would consider that to he easier to use (or at least on par) than Flash.

marshray 6y ago

Adobe had a decade or more to show that they could develop a secure browser plugin. They couldn't do it, or decided their resources were better spent elsewhere. If you don't want to maintain a small army of full-time security staff, you can't ship binary code running untrusted data-as-programs on billions of consumer devices. Full stop.

etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
Sandboxing turned out to be a good answer. I don't know why we don't just implement Flash in WebAssembly and be done with it. It can still be built-in to web browsers.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  It's being done: https://leaningtech.com/pages/cheerpx.html https://leaningtech.com/pages/cheerpx.html
  - etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
    In fact, it's probably possible to recompile x86 Flash to webassembly and run the real thing...
  - apignotti 6y ago
    Hello! Author of the tool here, if anybody has questions I am available on Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexpignotti https://twitter.com/alexpignotti
agrippanux 6y ago
Adobe didn’t want to continue to support Flash. I know this because their office was across the street from Zynga’s and they came over and told us (I was running a team at the time doing experimental HTML5 games). Their plan was to move to Air and they hyped the crap out of it to us. Much effort was put into Air research and development. As a result, Zynga IPOd with a ton of huge web games in the pipeline with the theory we could cross compile with Air. This was a massive mistake and Supercell and King quickly dominated us while the next few years were spent catching up on mobile gaming.

sp332 6y ago

July 2017 - HTML5 games account for more than 50% of all new games uploaded to Kongregate and almost 50% of the revenue. https://blog.kongregate.com/html5-is-here/ https://blog.kongregate.com/html5-is-here/

ckocagil 6y ago
50% doesn't mean much when the website itself loses its relevance: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=kongregate https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=kongrega...
- madeofpalk 6y ago
  Maybe just no one wants the website any more?
- ed312 6y ago
  Wow, they all trend the exact same way. End of an era, but sadly missed.
- thearchitect1 6y ago
  Jesus, thats pretty sad. Rip kongerate you will be missed o7

hombre_fatal 6y ago

You're really barking up the wrong tree here. What this news really means is that how people are using the web is changing. When I was younger, browser games were the only real way to play games without spending money or having my parents buy me a Gameboy (which they never did). I could get on Newgrounds from any PC at school, it was a big part of my life. These days, every one of Kongregate's users has a smartphone with free games more accessible and convenient than the old browser gaming model. I run an internet writing forum that has also suffered over the years despite being a relatively massive forum in its hey day. What changed? I think these are just the affects of the smartphone era. And the centralization of social media, in my case. People just don't go to Kongregate anymore, the hey day is over. And it's not because of Flash/HTML5 -- it's not like users in droves are even thinking about that. Kongregate has to somehow compete with kids playing Fortnite on their iPhone before class for free. Times are changing.

GuiA 6y ago
> I run an internet writing forum that has also suffered over the years despite being a relatively massive forum in its hey day. What changed? I think these are just the affects of the smartphone era. I wonder what the phpBB of social media/smartphone apps would look like.
- camgunz 6y ago
  Instagram
  - Gigablah 6y ago
    As someone who runs a vBulletin forum, seems like Discord is the rage nowadays.
    - Apocryphon 6y ago
      Thing is, Discord is a chatroom, and chat and forums are fundamentally different. Realtime vs. slightly less constant. Forums produce less of a flood. More easily searchable, allowing quote replies (something Slack has Discord doesn't). Forums might be old-school, but I find them eminently more readable than commercialized chatrooms like Discord or Slack. And they allow for more powerful discussions than quasi-BBS like Reddit or Hacker News.

Riverheart 6y ago

Agreed. I've played free flash games on Kongregate that were better quality and more original than many things you'll pay for on Steam. That said, I've been pleased to find Don't Escape and Deep Sleep on Steam and it's nice to give back. Wish more creators would do that.

azhenley 6y ago

In college I made a living from releasing Flash games that I made during the weekends. Nothing has matched the ease of distributing a Flash game. My games would spread to hundreds of websites with video advertisements in them.

clusterfish 6y ago

It went into mobile apps. The browser part didn't matter to most people. So now we have walled gardens.

nabilhat 6y ago

Flash is about more than just games, musicals featuring Colin Mochrie, and documentaries about badgers and mushrooms. Flash has lasting anthropological significance. Some of the kids who grew up tinkering with Flash grew into structural roles and helped build the internet as we know it today. Others sequestered the interests that got kicked off of the mainstream into petri dish crevices of the internet such as the early days of 4chan.

mtrower 6y ago
> documentaries about badgers and mushrooms Documentaries about snakes, as well? In all seriousness, you make a reasonable argument, but tinkering existed well before the age of Flash. Now, won't something else fill the role?

thedirt0115 6y ago

I too miss Flash games, but there are still tons and tons of free indie games on the web. Have you checked out itch.io, for example? There are ~90k free HTML5 games [1]. [1]: https://itch.io/games/html5 https://itch.io/games/html5

awscherb 6y ago

Kongregate, what a trip. I saw 'Kongregate' in the title and thought 'hey, I have games published there!' As a teenager, using MochiAds to get paid for some flash games was absurd - this was something I was just "good at", and honestly, what really introduced me to software development as both a passion and a career.

biryani_chicken 6y ago

We now have DOS emulators in the browser[0]. Do that with Flash! [0] https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games

dmix 6y ago

> all vendors had to do was to sandbox Flash If only browser security was so simple.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

> Where has the entire browser gaming ecosystem gone to? https://itch.io/ https://itch.io/, basically. There's also the Pico-8 gaming ecosystem which has some really great concepts built with the platform's constraints: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

musicale 6y ago

I think Jobs was right about Flash, but you are also right about Flash; the browser game ecosystem was nice. Several key aspects of Flash, 90s web, Hypercard and other technologies that sustained creative enthusiast ecosystems seem to have been low barrier to entry, easy sharing and discovery, and a lack of obvious alternatives for a large pool of creators and users. Those things are hard to (re)create. On the other hand, demoscene shows no signs of dying as far as I can tell. The app economy is huge and locks in creators and users, but it has high barriers to entry as well as poor discovery and very limited sharing locked down by the platform owner. There seem to be many easy-to-use game engines, as well as sites for web games, but that's part of the problem - there isn't the concentration of interest in one class of games or an easy way to share them across sites.