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The Future of Games is an Instant Flash to the past

222 points by meheleventyone 5y ago

gre 5y ago
I went on a cabin retreat and my friend's 14 year old son was playing this a couple weeks ago. It really is that popular.
- wolfram74 5y ago
  I wonder if certain genre's are seasonal and other's ever green? Like, there hasn't been a new RTS that penetrated my radar like starcraft in awhile. Maybe there'll be a bump in sales for Crypt Of the Necrodancer.[0] [0]https://braceyourselfgames.com/crypt-of-the-necrodancer/ https://braceyourselfgames.com/crypt-of-the-necrodancer/
  - syzygyhack 5y ago
    Eyes on Frost Giant to deliver us the spiritual SC3
  - ehnto 5y ago
    Some games build a community that has quite a bit of inertia to switching. Starcraft has an enormous community and competitive apparatus surrounding it, even if a game was better mechanically, it's unlikely to dethrone StarCraft without a fairly unique situation happening. The more likely scenario is StarCraft gets messed up in some way that splits the community into a new game. In my opinion anyhow.
  - handrous 5y ago
    I think "classic" RTS is an interesting case that's not likely to return in anything like the form some of us used to like. There are at least two audiences for traditional RTS: the ones who want an experience resembling speed chess and are focused on multiplayer, and the ones who don't care about anything more than maybe a little casual multiplayer, and mostly want the campaign. Looking back, all the RTS games I played growing up, as the latter kind of gamer, were sort of bad at delivering what I wanted, even the greats. Teasing out the elements into their own things makes them so much better. Base-building is a better single-player experience when it's more like city-builders with objectives. Moving your little dudes around a map in service of a story is better when there's minimal or no base-building, and certainly when most maps don't revolve around both sides building bases while trying to destroy the other's. Grand strategy scratches another part of the RTS itch. Certain RPGs, another. They all shine better, doing what they do, than RTS did, however nostalgic I am for the abstract ideal of it, which, in hindsight, was never even really approached by the actual games. Meanwhile, the RTS genre seems to have refined more and more into the multiplayer speed-chess-alike space, sometimes dropping some traditional elements of the genre in order to hyper-focus on delivering that experience, all of which makes it even less interesting to me (but I gather has made it much better for people who want that). It's not the 90s now, so you can ship a game that's almost entirely focused on online multiplayer, with little or nothing to offer for single-player, and it can still sell, so there's no need to try to tack a satisfying single-player campaign on to these.
- flemhans 5y ago
  And it seems super similar to the old "Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe" series of games.
sktrdie 5y ago
Gamedev has got to be the most rewarding type of software coding there is. It’s a type of coding that is much closer to actual artistic creation rather than engineering. The sheer amount of creative & engaging stories, puzzles, real-time strategies and on top of this entirely multiplayerable online allows for an infinite amount of types of entertaining creations… all made possible thanks to code. Sure there’s untapped potential in all kinds of types of software; hell people are reinventing 2d design (think Figma etc) & issue management (newly released GitHub issues). But surely building “yet another react form” feels like coding an already solved problem. What I mean is that gamedev has possibly the most untapped potential for coders wanting to make something truly amazing, with a sheer infinite amount of possible creations. You’re not approaching the creation with the usual “what problem am I trying to solve” but rather “what’s the most fun thing I can build?”.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  I agree wholeheartedly; it's also much harder and not very economically rewarding on average
- ChrisRR 5y ago
  Unfortunately it's not. If you're working on a small 1 or 2 person game where your work blurs the lines of art and engineering, you're highly unlikely to be successful. For every Undertale there are literally hundreds of other indie games that barely earned a penny It only takes a small studio of like 10 people before you're practically never touching anything creative and are working on software tools and under the hood functionality just like any other dev job
  - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
    You're thinking of money. The parent poster was talking about art. If you can afford it, gamedev allows you to blow not only your own mind, but also the minds of everyone else - especially new generations who have learned the medium from birth.
    - 5y ago
ArkanExplorer 5y ago
I think its difficult to extrapolate this based on the success of a single game. What is clear, is that the 30% commission charged by platform holders is absolutely stifling creativity and output, in apps and games. Plus, the extra costs from VAT and refunds. Friday Night Funkin's chief innovation is that it basically bypasses this by using Kickstarter to fund production.
- ehnto 5y ago
  It's an insane margin. You still have to pay tax on that at some point too. You put your heart, soul and dollars into producing a piece of software and between the platform barons and the tax man you may not even get 50% of it, depending on where you live.
- mattfrommars 5y ago
  I agree. And who came up with 30%? It seems to be industry wide extraction fees. Why stop at 30, why not 50?
  - ArkanExplorer 5y ago
    30% made sense when you were getting white-glove service from the platform owner, when that platform was actively building out new features, when there was little competition from other software, huge growth in customer base, and when bandwidth and ecommerce generally were still expensive and difficult. Now, the platform owners have dropped all developer support to basically zero, are just sitting on core systems that were created 10+ years ago, have no curation, and all of their fixed and marginal costs have been pushed towards zero. You can go into the Steamworks dev forum for example and find ongoing major platform issues that have been raised for years, consensus gained from a lot of other devs that they need to be fixed, and just never addressed or even responded to by any Valve staff.
flohofwoe 5y ago
It's not as simple as declaring "instant games" as the future. The idea has been around for a long time after Flash got killed. Both WeChat and Facebook made a big deal about "instant games" (e.g. see https://www.facebook.com/games/instantgames https://www.facebook.com/games/instantgames), but so far there don't seem to be any breakout hits (at least on FB, don't know what's the situation on WeChat). There seems to be a general disinterest by investors, developers and gamers, apparently it's very hard to monetize instant games over a longer period. Even if there are some bursts of popularity, those games are soon forgotten because people don't stay around. A single game can change that, but nobody knows when this will arrive and what it will look like.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  The funding of "cloud gaming" and interest from investors like a16z as noted right at the top of the article mean it's on a bit of an upswing in terms of interest.
_dibly 5y ago
I feel like a lot of time was spent convincing the reader that instant games are the future and not explaining the benefits and potential shortcomings of the area. A significant amount of the article is filling in background information. I didn’t need two pages on why Apple and Steve Jobs are the worst thing to happen to instant games, the explanation of how flash games were once monetized, or a rundown of all the different ways that they (or indeed any digital service in the modern day) could become profitable. The article starts with a point that there is a huge spectrum between the arcade-style instant game and modern “full” games but then never really addresses that gap. They highlight that these games can be on a maintained third-party streaming service but then go on to focus mainly on browser games and make points that don’t even apply tangentially to things like Game Pass or PlayStation Now.
chairmanwow1 5y ago
This article takes a while to get to its point. I'm still not sure I understand what "instant" means in this context. Also I find the whole premise pretty claiming a single game => systemic market shift.
- FailMore 5y ago
  a browser based multiplayer game you can access with a link
  - ChrisRR 5y ago
    So the entire point is basically it's a flash game which doesn't need flash. Where has this person been?
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    Like this for example: https://dotbigbang.com/game/ee5d9ed9e9684cad865cf04cd425406a/fps---terminal-junction?mp=pewpew https://dotbigbang.com/game/ee5d9ed9e9684cad865cf04cd425406a... Although I'd argue that instant games don't necessarily need to be multiplayer. For example Friday Night Funkin isn't right now IIRC.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    Well, almost everything on Stadia matches that definition. You need to create an account and buy the game ( bar the few free games like Destiny 2 and a demo for Hitman WoA), but it's basically accessible via a link, playable in a browser and multiplayer when the game is.
    - meheleventyone 5y ago
      The point is that instant games are frictionless so having to create an account and buy the game adds enough of a barrier that clicking the link -> playing a game has a significant drop off in terms of people who will actually play the game. Stadia could do that but hasn't yet. A really strong demo for them would be to let you click a link and be playing a AAA game immediately. But as the article notes you have a scale problem immediately because you still need to run expensive hardware to support that.
the_lonely_road 5y ago
Holy shit its like this author just experienced his very first 'cultural wave' phenomenon and then decided that literally every small detail around it was some critical reason for its success. There are probably labs out there they have figured out how to send 'viral waves' out into the economy and profit from it, but thats all this is. Game of Thrones was an example, The Walking Dead was an example, Fortnite was an example, and Roblox was an example. Those examples highlight two very different viral culture waves. The kids playing games and the grown ups watching tv, but they highlight the exact same phenomenon. As for this game itself its probably exactly like Among Us and the million other little indie games like it that shot up in popularity 'out of know where' except it wasn't out of nowhere at all. It was a couple dozen HIGHLY interconnected Twitch streamers all getting into the same space and then 100's of follow along mid tier twitch streamers hoping to ride the new bandwagon to higher viewership.
- larsiusprime 5y ago
  Hey there author here! > It was a couple dozen HIGHLY interconnected Twitch streamers all getting into the same space and then 100's of follow along mid tier twitch streamers hoping to ride the new bandwagon to higher viewership. I have access to the traffic stats behind FNF and this is demonstrably false. There was a lot more to it. Twitch was one small part of this phenomenon. I'm happy to welcome critique but could you please be less dismissive and instead make a more substantive critique?
  - stragio 5y ago
    I think your article is great, hope you are right and align with your worldviews. Is @Tocelot your Twitter account?
    - larsiusprime 5y ago
      No I'm @larsiusprime. @tocelot is the a16z partner I quote at the beginning, but I'm not associated with that or any other VC firm. I'm an independent game developer and consultant with a blog.
megameter 5y ago
There are oodles of games that started as free games and then made a commercial release later on. It's not really unique to web or "instant". Further, there's a huuuge dropoff in interest once you do go to a paid release. Often these games are accessed from locked-down school or office environments as part of a "game jukebox" in the same way that YouTube often doubles as a "music jukebox" - there's minimal investment in what you're playing, so, like fast food, it's more important that it leaves a good impression in five minutes than to actually have substance. FNF's basic appeal is akin to a fashion brand with a cool logo - these characters could have used any number of delivery vehicles but the game, and the game when put on Newgrounds specifically, happened to be the right one with the right audience. And because it's positioned for ease of access you get the high virality. When you flip things so that the audience pays upfront, they have to have some conviction in this one, out of a countless number of games, being the one they should champion. It's just a radically different proposition and only some games can cross over between the two markets. FNF does benefit from having a lot more hardware and bandwidth available these days. Music is classically the Achilles' Heel of web gaming because it's either space-inefficient or you need to invest in a sequencer format of some sort(which was only feasible in Flash by fighting the available technology every step of the way). But FNF delivers full-length audio streams without too much difficulty, so we've clearly made some giant strides there.
lleb97a 5y ago
As a solo developer considering releasing - at least a demo - as a web-based game, this article is at least a little reassuring. Even though I'm still not convinced that it would be easy to monetize. Although I'm somewhat convinced that allowing people to play your game - instantly and for free - is highly-desirable.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  I think it's demonstrably the case that if you get the link in front of peoples eyeballs they will be much more likely to click it and actually play the demo then if they have to do anything else at all. The hard part is getting the eyeballs on the link in the first place. But that's the same problem you have on Steam and other app stores.
lilgreenland 5y ago
I'm secretly hoping for this type of success for my game. Realistically, I'm just glad I have a creative outlet. https://landgreen.github.io/sidescroller/index.html https://landgreen.github.io/sidescroller/index.html It's also free, open source, no ads, no micro-transactions, web based, no freemium, no data harvesting, no gacha, no crypto harvesting.
- gen_greyface 5y ago
  this is really good.
larsiusprime 5y ago
Author here! Couple of things -- despite the admittedly click-baity headline, I'm not 100% convinced that "instant games" are definitely the future. Nobody can predict the future with certainty. And as I state up front in the article FNF itself is obviously an outlier which should not serve as a model to try to replicate step by step. My main point is that instant games -- which is to say browser games -- are actually already the past and the present (even if they're not necessarily taking over everything else just yet), and most people are unfamiliar with a bunch of weird details about how they began in the first place. The article's actual thesis is not necessarily to prove to you that instant games are the "wave of the future" but to point out: 1) Even games industry insiders are often massively out of touch with trends 2) Browsers games represent the potential to disrupt existing gatekeepers and platforms 3) Browser games had a weird and unique ecosystem that represented a 'minor league' of games that provided an on-ramp to further professional success, especially for international developers, and we've largely lost that today 4) Modern platforms want to own the entire stack top to bottom (editing tools, playback engine, discovery, and marketplace), but trying to capture so much value yourself and tightly controlling the environment can actually stunt the ecosystem And yeah the article is really long. I'm chronically unable to write short articles when I have a lot to say and that means I'm taking the sincere risk of boring some of you to death while you wait for me to get to the point, sorry about that!
- Marazan 5y ago
  The one thing I think you missed from explaining the economics of the old Flash Game scene was Mochi. By getting you the pre-roll ads Mochi gave you a way of being rewarded on a per-play basis which A) bypassed the risjk of up front sponsorship number B) allowed absolute total amateurs to not even bother with sponsorship and just dump a game with Mochi ads onto the net, if it took off they would rake in the bucks. m Add on top of that the Mochi microtransaction infrastructure and I'd say Mochi was as important, if not more, than FGL for boosting the ouptu of games.
  - larsiusprime 5y ago
    Mochi was mentioned in the article, but yes, I did gloss over it, thanks for bringing it up. I used Mochi ads myself!
mysterydip 5y ago
I've recently switched back to html5 gamedev for my hobby projects and it's been great for online collaboration and rapid prototyping. Being rid of the hoops of app store submissions, being able to update at any time, and play on nearly any device has been very freeing.
toptal 5y ago
This is just a rehash of https://future.a16z.com/instant-games/ https://future.a16z.com/instant-games/ which itself is a rehash of what the co-founder of Playco stated.
- chromanoid 5y ago
  Erm, the article is mentioned right in the first sentence. Why so harsh?
hackererror404 5y ago
Sadly there's nothing "instant" about this... Takes a long time to load and it's pretty clunky once it does.
marstall 5y ago
Doesn't hurt that FNF is a game with considerable polish, swagger and fun, even compared to platform rhythm games!
thrower123 5y ago
Maybe, but the barrier of entry for HTML5 games is absurd compared to what you could do with Flash, RIP. Why does everything have to be so damned complicated these days? It's not necessary complication, it's complication for the sake of complication.
- xtracto 5y ago
  I completely agree. I used to make games back in the GWBASIC and DJGPP/Allegro age. I tried to retake that passion a couple of months ago and boy the complexity of Unity or all other gaming frameworks today amazed me.
- IIAOPSW 5y ago
  How else do you socially signify that you're a real professional who uses complex tools and should be paid good money because not just anyone can do what you do?
- cupofcoffee 5y ago
  What barrier of entry for HTML5 games? Not like you need to install 40 frameworks to make web games.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Compared with what Flash offered in tooling, pretty high.
- larsiusprime 5y ago
  Definitely agree. Some of the game engines are taking the pain out of this but Flash had something really special going with its stupidly easy to use animation-first workflow.
- xfer 5y ago
  I think virtual consoles are the answer here like pico8. But i am not a fan of pico8 limitations and also the design tools don't work on browser. I am keeping an eye on quadplay(https://github.com/morgan3d/quadplay https://github.com/morgan3d/quadplay) which seems interesting but also lacking design tools.
jedberg 5y ago
> My 15-year old nephew who isn't part of the game development scene almost certainly noticed this game before I did. Just think of all the other trends you and I are likely missing no matter how close we think we're paying attention. People like to make fun of me when I talk tech with teens (TM?). This is exactly why. Because as much as we think we're on top of all the latest trends, sometimes we're just too not hip.
- larsiusprime 5y ago
  Yup. I feel like a bunch of stuff is absolutely invisible to my industry bubble until it has a standout hit that makes a ton of money or starts getting talked about by someone everyone knows and trusts and then becomes impossible to ignore. And the lesson then should not be that "wow this is a perfectly replicatable formula" but, "maybe some of our assumptions are wrong." Which makes me further think -- how many OTHER transformative trends are we missing, because they AREN'T money or media based and thus destined to eventually pierce our industry bubble?
- jsnell 5y ago
  Is FNF really so significant that it was important not to miss it? Looking at Google Trends, it's already peaked, and peaked at far less interest than say Among Us or Fall Guys. It does appear have more longevity than Fall Guys did. But right now I just don't see either the cultural or commercial significance. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=roblox,among%20us,friday%20night%20funkin,fortnite,fall%20guys https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=roblox,among%20us... (But I hadn't heard of the game before now, so maybe dismissing it is just a bias on my part.)
  - jedberg 5y ago
    > Is FNF really so significant that it was important not to miss it? Probably not, but I also learned about Roblox, Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok from teens long before any of those got popular in my usual bubbles. In part because when I would tell my usual bubble about them, they were dismissed as fads.
cupofcoffee 5y ago
Seems a bit of a far-fetched conclusion from a black swan. Browser games allow you to fast prototype but people don't care at all whether the game is Flash or instant, written in C++ or you need to install some software to play it. The only thing they care about is the game good. Flappy bird had insane success as well, why not claim the future of games is mobile?
collaborative 5y ago
I have been downvoted for saying this before but I will say it again Indeed, the money should flow from app stores to developers and not the other way around Developers provide value to their platforms. Developers don't need them except for the fact that they enforce a monopoly on distribution (iOS) The day is coming when platforms will have to reward content creators based on usage metrics or simply up front. Platform subscriptions, micro payments, or platform ads are the future. And they will only get cheaper as time goes on A ruling forcing Apple to open up iOS to different browsers or app stores will be the sign that change is coming
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  For a short while, in the beginning, AppStores provided some value allowing you to select top games in category, which were actually good. But then SEO guys took notice and all top ratings are now populated by pay 2 win garbage games which invest heavily in AppStore optimization. You just can't find anything these days on Google Play / AppStore other than by typing a full name of the app. This, of course, relegates these services to gatekeeper role only, void of any positive benefits for the developers.
- Jakobeha 5y ago
  This seems to be what Apple Arcade is doing. You pay a subscription to Apple and get access to curated games with no ads or microtransactions. Apple pays the developers, although I don't know how. AFAIK it's going pretty well. I don't actually own Apple Arcade, but the games all look really nice, and no ads or microtransactions. Maybe someone who knows more can comment.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I do not have time to research to which games are implementing loot boxes or other gambling mechanics or showing them ads, so restricting my kids (while they are too young) mostly to Apple Arcade solves that problem for me. Although, who knows, maybe if Apple Arcade is compensating game makers by how much time is spent playing their games, then those tactics will be present in Apple Arcade too.
MrLeap 5y ago
What's old is new again, I remember when flash flash revolution was the thing everyone did in all the computer labs in highschool. If everything that was popular to teens during the flash era has a shot, I prognosticate we'll see haxe ways to box celebrities.. uhh elaborately choreographed stick figure violence, and a whole lot of things that are based off old warcraft 3 custom maps. Also winter bells. Definitely winter bells.
hoytech 5y ago
> Before smartphones, Flash came pre-installed on approximately every single consumer computing device except for home consoles. No matter what kind of computer, operating system, or browser your cousin was running, you could just send her a link to a funny cartoon or game and it would Just Work™ That was not my experience with Flash on Linux or BSD. It was a huge pain getting it to work and keeping it updated. Anyone remember having to load a Flash app just to see a restaurant menu? I'm very happy you don't need Flash anymore to browse the web.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  No worries, soon enough you will get to load Blazor app instead.
Jakobeha 5y ago
I really wish internet games were the future. Both from the producer and consumer side - as someone who tried to make games before, and currently owns a low-end mac (great for productivity but bad for gaming) - I really believe the ideal is web-games that are easy to start and work everywhere. The issue is that at least in my experience web game engines suck. JavaScript is slow and awful for large-scale software, even today. Frameworks which compile into JavaScript and WASM (e.g. libGDX) compile incorrectly, leading to obscure awful bugs, and they're still slow because JS. Your best bet is a general-purpose game engine like Unity or Godot which can export to web, but still, the web export is often broken, missing features, and just slow. Even tiny games I've played on itch.io either don't load or play super slow, and sometimes that might be the dev's fault, but often I think it's the state of web-gamedev in general.
- socialist_coder 5y ago
  > Your best bet is a general-purpose game engine like Unity or Godot which can export to web Totally disagree about Unity. Unity's web export is awful. If you want a good web game you need to use a web-native engine like Pixi, PlayCanvas, or Phaser. I guess the Haxe & Godot tools are good too but I've never used them. The huge advantage with using a Javascript/Typescript based game engine is that you can use the latest & greatest build tools like Webpack, and the latest ECMA/javascript features, instead of some proprietary tool chain that hasn't seen a major updated in years. I think mobile game companies who have only been using Unity and have all their games built in Unity will have a hard time transitioning to mobile because you just cannot use Unity to make good web games. You have to rebuild them in a new engine. But, if you use a web game engine, you can still target mobile. So, I would not use Unity for any new mobile/web game projects.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Except Unity on mobile will be able to take advantage of Vulkan, Metal and GL ES 3.2, while WebGL is stuck in ES 3.0 subset and who knows when WebGPU (with a MVP 1.0) will come out into stable.
socialist_coder 5y ago
Facebook Instant is actually a pretty incredible platform, IMO. Tons of games on there, available to play with 1 click and no install. They all load pretty fast and the performance is great. Almost none are built with Unity. It's very very rare to find one that isn't built with a web-native game engine. Check it out if you've never seen it, you will be impressed. https://www.facebook.com/instantgames/ https://www.facebook.com/instantgames/ The crappy thing is that iOS doesn't let you do IAPs on FB Instant. So you can only have IAPs on Android & Desktop. Ad monetization works everywhere though.
bstar77 5y ago
I agree that instant games are and will continue to be desirable for a sizable audience. Correlating that to Adobe Flash completely lost me. My NES games are instant and that preceded Flash by decades. In fact, I think the 8-bit era inspires game devs today far more than the early-mid 2000's browser games.
wiradikusuma 5y ago
"instant games"... here I am 10 minutes down, the game is still loading at 11%
mrkramer 5y ago
The future of gaming is cloud gaming. Moore's law is our friend.
ogurechny 5y ago
Side note about “instant multiplayer Minecraft”: Minetest is as instant as possible for a native application: you download the client (about 25 MB), then connect to any server, no matter which games and mods run there, and have all the needed assets streamed from it, too. Non-existing nickname is all the identification player needs, IRC-style. It is even inter-operable across major versions and forks, at least to some extent. Of course, it has been this way because it has a typical relatively small and tight open source community, but, from a cursory look, it is possible for a public server to have a protected spawn/sightseeing area with rules and information, then (auto)grant new players who want to participate various gameplay privileges based on their progress. It doesn't seem that web client built in the same manner is impossible. What's impossible is, most likely, telling a browser to give you a gigabyte or two of memory to keep the local world area, then step aside and forget about it.
ch00se 5y ago
Great article! Thanks so much for talking about FGL. I'm one of the co-founders, and helping Flash developers and portals was definitely a special time that I remember fondly.
Ronson 5y ago
By far, the worst thing I ever done was Game Development. I poured years of starting my career into it. I worked at Sony in the UK then Bizarre Creations and had a wee go at Rockstar North. Bizarre Creations was amazing, and everything else was terrible. Not too long after, the financial crisis hit and I found myself working on the Flash Runtime just to earn a crust (my partner and I had just got a house and her father was diagnosed with cancer so I was kind of stuck in the wrong location). Then Stevo came along and that ended any hope of continuing with Flash Runtime. I eked out some work with Scaleform. Then Typescript came out, then Angular, and now I work 1% of the effort for 10000%+ uptake on my salary and never looked back. Game development is genuinely a mugs game and I'd urge everyone not to do it.
kmeisthax 5y ago
Excellent article. One thing I do want to point out is that it's recently come to light that Apple actually did try to push for Flash Player on the iPhone, and later, on the iPad. It came down to two problems: 1. Surmountable engineering problems. Flash on phones ran like crap... like everything else on early iPhone prototypes. Apple did a shitton of work to get the iPhone to fit on hilariously underpowered hardware, a journey Adobe never really undertook 2. The CEO of Adobe wouldn't take Steve Jobs's calls Adobe was disinvited from the iPhone party not because it competed with the App Store (they didn't even HAVE an App Store at launch), but because Adobe was (and still is) a company that fundamentally does not understand touch input or mobile devices. Or anything that requires substantial engineering investment. Hell, Flash wasn't even their baby, their competitor Macromedia did most of the work. Even AS3 had to have been in development pre-aquisition (given the stories I heard about them trying to license Java).

gre 5y ago

I went on a cabin retreat and my friend's 14 year old son was playing this a couple weeks ago. It really is that popular.

wolfram74 5y ago
I wonder if certain genre's are seasonal and other's ever green? Like, there hasn't been a new RTS that penetrated my radar like starcraft in awhile. Maybe there'll be a bump in sales for Crypt Of the Necrodancer.[0] [0]https://braceyourselfgames.com/crypt-of-the-necrodancer/ https://braceyourselfgames.com/crypt-of-the-necrodancer/
- syzygyhack 5y ago
  Eyes on Frost Giant to deliver us the spiritual SC3
- ehnto 5y ago
  Some games build a community that has quite a bit of inertia to switching. Starcraft has an enormous community and competitive apparatus surrounding it, even if a game was better mechanically, it's unlikely to dethrone StarCraft without a fairly unique situation happening. The more likely scenario is StarCraft gets messed up in some way that splits the community into a new game. In my opinion anyhow.
- handrous 5y ago
  I think "classic" RTS is an interesting case that's not likely to return in anything like the form some of us used to like. There are at least two audiences for traditional RTS: the ones who want an experience resembling speed chess and are focused on multiplayer, and the ones who don't care about anything more than maybe a little casual multiplayer, and mostly want the campaign. Looking back, all the RTS games I played growing up, as the latter kind of gamer, were sort of bad at delivering what I wanted, even the greats. Teasing out the elements into their own things makes them so much better. Base-building is a better single-player experience when it's more like city-builders with objectives. Moving your little dudes around a map in service of a story is better when there's minimal or no base-building, and certainly when most maps don't revolve around both sides building bases while trying to destroy the other's. Grand strategy scratches another part of the RTS itch. Certain RPGs, another. They all shine better, doing what they do, than RTS did, however nostalgic I am for the abstract ideal of it, which, in hindsight, was never even really approached by the actual games. Meanwhile, the RTS genre seems to have refined more and more into the multiplayer speed-chess-alike space, sometimes dropping some traditional elements of the genre in order to hyper-focus on delivering that experience, all of which makes it even less interesting to me (but I gather has made it much better for people who want that). It's not the 90s now, so you can ship a game that's almost entirely focused on online multiplayer, with little or nothing to offer for single-player, and it can still sell, so there's no need to try to tack a satisfying single-player campaign on to these.
flemhans 5y ago
And it seems super similar to the old "Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe" series of games.

sktrdie 5y ago

Gamedev has got to be the most rewarding type of software coding there is. It’s a type of coding that is much closer to actual artistic creation rather than engineering. The sheer amount of creative & engaging stories, puzzles, real-time strategies and on top of this entirely multiplayerable online allows for an infinite amount of types of entertaining creations… all made possible thanks to code. Sure there’s untapped potential in all kinds of types of software; hell people are reinventing 2d design (think Figma etc) & issue management (newly released GitHub issues). But surely building “yet another react form” feels like coding an already solved problem. What I mean is that gamedev has possibly the most untapped potential for coders wanting to make something truly amazing, with a sheer infinite amount of possible creations. You’re not approaching the creation with the usual “what problem am I trying to solve” but rather “what’s the most fun thing I can build?”.

jokethrowaway 5y ago
I agree wholeheartedly; it's also much harder and not very economically rewarding on average
ChrisRR 5y ago
Unfortunately it's not. If you're working on a small 1 or 2 person game where your work blurs the lines of art and engineering, you're highly unlikely to be successful. For every Undertale there are literally hundreds of other indie games that barely earned a penny It only takes a small studio of like 10 people before you're practically never touching anything creative and are working on software tools and under the hood functionality just like any other dev job
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  You're thinking of money. The parent poster was talking about art. If you can afford it, gamedev allows you to blow not only your own mind, but also the minds of everyone else - especially new generations who have learned the medium from birth.
  - 5y ago

ArkanExplorer 5y ago

I think its difficult to extrapolate this based on the success of a single game. What is clear, is that the 30% commission charged by platform holders is absolutely stifling creativity and output, in apps and games. Plus, the extra costs from VAT and refunds. Friday Night Funkin's chief innovation is that it basically bypasses this by using Kickstarter to fund production.

ehnto 5y ago
It's an insane margin. You still have to pay tax on that at some point too. You put your heart, soul and dollars into producing a piece of software and between the platform barons and the tax man you may not even get 50% of it, depending on where you live.
mattfrommars 5y ago
I agree. And who came up with 30%? It seems to be industry wide extraction fees. Why stop at 30, why not 50?
- ArkanExplorer 5y ago
  30% made sense when you were getting white-glove service from the platform owner, when that platform was actively building out new features, when there was little competition from other software, huge growth in customer base, and when bandwidth and ecommerce generally were still expensive and difficult. Now, the platform owners have dropped all developer support to basically zero, are just sitting on core systems that were created 10+ years ago, have no curation, and all of their fixed and marginal costs have been pushed towards zero. You can go into the Steamworks dev forum for example and find ongoing major platform issues that have been raised for years, consensus gained from a lot of other devs that they need to be fixed, and just never addressed or even responded to by any Valve staff.

flohofwoe 5y ago

It's not as simple as declaring "instant games" as the future. The idea has been around for a long time after Flash got killed. Both WeChat and Facebook made a big deal about "instant games" (e.g. see https://www.facebook.com/games/instantgames https://www.facebook.com/games/instantgames), but so far there don't seem to be any breakout hits (at least on FB, don't know what's the situation on WeChat). There seems to be a general disinterest by investors, developers and gamers, apparently it's very hard to monetize instant games over a longer period. Even if there are some bursts of popularity, those games are soon forgotten because people don't stay around. A single game can change that, but nobody knows when this will arrive and what it will look like.

meheleventyone 5y ago
The funding of "cloud gaming" and interest from investors like a16z as noted right at the top of the article mean it's on a bit of an upswing in terms of interest.

_dibly 5y ago

I feel like a lot of time was spent convincing the reader that instant games are the future and not explaining the benefits and potential shortcomings of the area. A significant amount of the article is filling in background information. I didn’t need two pages on why Apple and Steve Jobs are the worst thing to happen to instant games, the explanation of how flash games were once monetized, or a rundown of all the different ways that they (or indeed any digital service in the modern day) could become profitable. The article starts with a point that there is a huge spectrum between the arcade-style instant game and modern “full” games but then never really addresses that gap. They highlight that these games can be on a maintained third-party streaming service but then go on to focus mainly on browser games and make points that don’t even apply tangentially to things like Game Pass or PlayStation Now.

chairmanwow1 5y ago

This article takes a while to get to its point. I'm still not sure I understand what "instant" means in this context. Also I find the whole premise pretty claiming a single game => systemic market shift.

FailMore 5y ago
a browser based multiplayer game you can access with a link
- ChrisRR 5y ago
  So the entire point is basically it's a flash game which doesn't need flash. Where has this person been?
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  Like this for example: https://dotbigbang.com/game/ee5d9ed9e9684cad865cf04cd425406a/fps---terminal-junction?mp=pewpew https://dotbigbang.com/game/ee5d9ed9e9684cad865cf04cd425406a... Although I'd argue that instant games don't necessarily need to be multiplayer. For example Friday Night Funkin isn't right now IIRC.
- sofixa 5y ago
  Well, almost everything on Stadia matches that definition. You need to create an account and buy the game ( bar the few free games like Destiny 2 and a demo for Hitman WoA), but it's basically accessible via a link, playable in a browser and multiplayer when the game is.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    The point is that instant games are frictionless so having to create an account and buy the game adds enough of a barrier that clicking the link -> playing a game has a significant drop off in terms of people who will actually play the game. Stadia could do that but hasn't yet. A really strong demo for them would be to let you click a link and be playing a AAA game immediately. But as the article notes you have a scale problem immediately because you still need to run expensive hardware to support that.

the_lonely_road 5y ago

Holy shit its like this author just experienced his very first 'cultural wave' phenomenon and then decided that literally every small detail around it was some critical reason for its success. There are probably labs out there they have figured out how to send 'viral waves' out into the economy and profit from it, but thats all this is. Game of Thrones was an example, The Walking Dead was an example, Fortnite was an example, and Roblox was an example. Those examples highlight two very different viral culture waves. The kids playing games and the grown ups watching tv, but they highlight the exact same phenomenon. As for this game itself its probably exactly like Among Us and the million other little indie games like it that shot up in popularity 'out of know where' except it wasn't out of nowhere at all. It was a couple dozen HIGHLY interconnected Twitch streamers all getting into the same space and then 100's of follow along mid tier twitch streamers hoping to ride the new bandwagon to higher viewership.

larsiusprime 5y ago
Hey there author here! > It was a couple dozen HIGHLY interconnected Twitch streamers all getting into the same space and then 100's of follow along mid tier twitch streamers hoping to ride the new bandwagon to higher viewership. I have access to the traffic stats behind FNF and this is demonstrably false. There was a lot more to it. Twitch was one small part of this phenomenon. I'm happy to welcome critique but could you please be less dismissive and instead make a more substantive critique?
- stragio 5y ago
  I think your article is great, hope you are right and align with your worldviews. Is @Tocelot your Twitter account?
  - larsiusprime 5y ago
    No I'm @larsiusprime. @tocelot is the a16z partner I quote at the beginning, but I'm not associated with that or any other VC firm. I'm an independent game developer and consultant with a blog.

megameter 5y ago

There are oodles of games that started as free games and then made a commercial release later on. It's not really unique to web or "instant". Further, there's a huuuge dropoff in interest once you do go to a paid release. Often these games are accessed from locked-down school or office environments as part of a "game jukebox" in the same way that YouTube often doubles as a "music jukebox" - there's minimal investment in what you're playing, so, like fast food, it's more important that it leaves a good impression in five minutes than to actually have substance. FNF's basic appeal is akin to a fashion brand with a cool logo - these characters could have used any number of delivery vehicles but the game, and the game when put on Newgrounds specifically, happened to be the right one with the right audience. And because it's positioned for ease of access you get the high virality. When you flip things so that the audience pays upfront, they have to have some conviction in this one, out of a countless number of games, being the one they should champion. It's just a radically different proposition and only some games can cross over between the two markets. FNF does benefit from having a lot more hardware and bandwidth available these days. Music is classically the Achilles' Heel of web gaming because it's either space-inefficient or you need to invest in a sequencer format of some sort(which was only feasible in Flash by fighting the available technology every step of the way). But FNF delivers full-length audio streams without too much difficulty, so we've clearly made some giant strides there.

lleb97a 5y ago

As a solo developer considering releasing - at least a demo - as a web-based game, this article is at least a little reassuring. Even though I'm still not convinced that it would be easy to monetize. Although I'm somewhat convinced that allowing people to play your game - instantly and for free - is highly-desirable.

meheleventyone 5y ago
I think it's demonstrably the case that if you get the link in front of peoples eyeballs they will be much more likely to click it and actually play the demo then if they have to do anything else at all. The hard part is getting the eyeballs on the link in the first place. But that's the same problem you have on Steam and other app stores.

lilgreenland 5y ago

I'm secretly hoping for this type of success for my game. Realistically, I'm just glad I have a creative outlet. https://landgreen.github.io/sidescroller/index.html https://landgreen.github.io/sidescroller/index.html It's also free, open source, no ads, no micro-transactions, web based, no freemium, no data harvesting, no gacha, no crypto harvesting.

gen_greyface 5y ago
this is really good.

larsiusprime 5y ago

Author here! Couple of things -- despite the admittedly click-baity headline, I'm not 100% convinced that "instant games" are definitely the future. Nobody can predict the future with certainty. And as I state up front in the article FNF itself is obviously an outlier which should not serve as a model to try to replicate step by step. My main point is that instant games -- which is to say browser games -- are actually already the past and the present (even if they're not necessarily taking over everything else just yet), and most people are unfamiliar with a bunch of weird details about how they began in the first place. The article's actual thesis is not necessarily to prove to you that instant games are the "wave of the future" but to point out: 1) Even games industry insiders are often massively out of touch with trends 2) Browsers games represent the potential to disrupt existing gatekeepers and platforms 3) Browser games had a weird and unique ecosystem that represented a 'minor league' of games that provided an on-ramp to further professional success, especially for international developers, and we've largely lost that today 4) Modern platforms want to own the entire stack top to bottom (editing tools, playback engine, discovery, and marketplace), but trying to capture so much value yourself and tightly controlling the environment can actually stunt the ecosystem And yeah the article is really long. I'm chronically unable to write short articles when I have a lot to say and that means I'm taking the sincere risk of boring some of you to death while you wait for me to get to the point, sorry about that!

Marazan 5y ago
The one thing I think you missed from explaining the economics of the old Flash Game scene was Mochi. By getting you the pre-roll ads Mochi gave you a way of being rewarded on a per-play basis which A) bypassed the risjk of up front sponsorship number B) allowed absolute total amateurs to not even bother with sponsorship and just dump a game with Mochi ads onto the net, if it took off they would rake in the bucks. m Add on top of that the Mochi microtransaction infrastructure and I'd say Mochi was as important, if not more, than FGL for boosting the ouptu of games.
- larsiusprime 5y ago
  Mochi was mentioned in the article, but yes, I did gloss over it, thanks for bringing it up. I used Mochi ads myself!

mysterydip 5y ago

I've recently switched back to html5 gamedev for my hobby projects and it's been great for online collaboration and rapid prototyping. Being rid of the hoops of app store submissions, being able to update at any time, and play on nearly any device has been very freeing.

toptal 5y ago

This is just a rehash of https://future.a16z.com/instant-games/ https://future.a16z.com/instant-games/ which itself is a rehash of what the co-founder of Playco stated.

chromanoid 5y ago
Erm, the article is mentioned right in the first sentence. Why so harsh?

hackererror404 5y ago

Sadly there's nothing "instant" about this... Takes a long time to load and it's pretty clunky once it does.

marstall 5y ago

Doesn't hurt that FNF is a game with considerable polish, swagger and fun, even compared to platform rhythm games!

thrower123 5y ago

Maybe, but the barrier of entry for HTML5 games is absurd compared to what you could do with Flash, RIP. Why does everything have to be so damned complicated these days? It's not necessary complication, it's complication for the sake of complication.

xtracto 5y ago
I completely agree. I used to make games back in the GWBASIC and DJGPP/Allegro age. I tried to retake that passion a couple of months ago and boy the complexity of Unity or all other gaming frameworks today amazed me.
IIAOPSW 5y ago
How else do you socially signify that you're a real professional who uses complex tools and should be paid good money because not just anyone can do what you do?
cupofcoffee 5y ago
What barrier of entry for HTML5 games? Not like you need to install 40 frameworks to make web games.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Compared with what Flash offered in tooling, pretty high.
larsiusprime 5y ago
Definitely agree. Some of the game engines are taking the pain out of this but Flash had something really special going with its stupidly easy to use animation-first workflow.
xfer 5y ago
I think virtual consoles are the answer here like pico8. But i am not a fan of pico8 limitations and also the design tools don't work on browser. I am keeping an eye on quadplay(https://github.com/morgan3d/quadplay https://github.com/morgan3d/quadplay) which seems interesting but also lacking design tools.

jedberg 5y ago

> My 15-year old nephew who isn't part of the game development scene almost certainly noticed this game before I did. Just think of all the other trends you and I are likely missing no matter how close we think we're paying attention. People like to make fun of me when I talk tech with teens (TM?). This is exactly why. Because as much as we think we're on top of all the latest trends, sometimes we're just too not hip.

larsiusprime 5y ago
Yup. I feel like a bunch of stuff is absolutely invisible to my industry bubble until it has a standout hit that makes a ton of money or starts getting talked about by someone everyone knows and trusts and then becomes impossible to ignore. And the lesson then should not be that "wow this is a perfectly replicatable formula" but, "maybe some of our assumptions are wrong." Which makes me further think -- how many OTHER transformative trends are we missing, because they AREN'T money or media based and thus destined to eventually pierce our industry bubble?
jsnell 5y ago
Is FNF really so significant that it was important not to miss it? Looking at Google Trends, it's already peaked, and peaked at far less interest than say Among Us or Fall Guys. It does appear have more longevity than Fall Guys did. But right now I just don't see either the cultural or commercial significance. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=roblox,among%20us,friday%20night%20funkin,fortnite,fall%20guys https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=roblox,among%20us... (But I hadn't heard of the game before now, so maybe dismissing it is just a bias on my part.)
- jedberg 5y ago
  > Is FNF really so significant that it was important not to miss it? Probably not, but I also learned about Roblox, Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok from teens long before any of those got popular in my usual bubbles. In part because when I would tell my usual bubble about them, they were dismissed as fads.

cupofcoffee 5y ago

Seems a bit of a far-fetched conclusion from a black swan. Browser games allow you to fast prototype but people don't care at all whether the game is Flash or instant, written in C++ or you need to install some software to play it. The only thing they care about is the game good. Flappy bird had insane success as well, why not claim the future of games is mobile?

collaborative 5y ago

I have been downvoted for saying this before but I will say it again Indeed, the money should flow from app stores to developers and not the other way around Developers provide value to their platforms. Developers don't need them except for the fact that they enforce a monopoly on distribution (iOS) The day is coming when platforms will have to reward content creators based on usage metrics or simply up front. Platform subscriptions, micro payments, or platform ads are the future. And they will only get cheaper as time goes on A ruling forcing Apple to open up iOS to different browsers or app stores will be the sign that change is coming

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
For a short while, in the beginning, AppStores provided some value allowing you to select top games in category, which were actually good. But then SEO guys took notice and all top ratings are now populated by pay 2 win garbage games which invest heavily in AppStore optimization. You just can't find anything these days on Google Play / AppStore other than by typing a full name of the app. This, of course, relegates these services to gatekeeper role only, void of any positive benefits for the developers.
Jakobeha 5y ago
This seems to be what Apple Arcade is doing. You pay a subscription to Apple and get access to curated games with no ads or microtransactions. Apple pays the developers, although I don't know how. AFAIK it's going pretty well. I don't actually own Apple Arcade, but the games all look really nice, and no ads or microtransactions. Maybe someone who knows more can comment.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  I do not have time to research to which games are implementing loot boxes or other gambling mechanics or showing them ads, so restricting my kids (while they are too young) mostly to Apple Arcade solves that problem for me. Although, who knows, maybe if Apple Arcade is compensating game makers by how much time is spent playing their games, then those tactics will be present in Apple Arcade too.

MrLeap 5y ago

What's old is new again, I remember when flash flash revolution was the thing everyone did in all the computer labs in highschool. If everything that was popular to teens during the flash era has a shot, I prognosticate we'll see haxe ways to box celebrities.. uhh elaborately choreographed stick figure violence, and a whole lot of things that are based off old warcraft 3 custom maps. Also winter bells. Definitely winter bells.

hoytech 5y ago

> Before smartphones, Flash came pre-installed on approximately every single consumer computing device except for home consoles. No matter what kind of computer, operating system, or browser your cousin was running, you could just send her a link to a funny cartoon or game and it would Just Work™ That was not my experience with Flash on Linux or BSD. It was a huge pain getting it to work and keeping it updated. Anyone remember having to load a Flash app just to see a restaurant menu? I'm very happy you don't need Flash anymore to browse the web.

pjmlp 5y ago
No worries, soon enough you will get to load Blazor app instead.

Jakobeha 5y ago

I really wish internet games were the future. Both from the producer and consumer side - as someone who tried to make games before, and currently owns a low-end mac (great for productivity but bad for gaming) - I really believe the ideal is web-games that are easy to start and work everywhere. The issue is that at least in my experience web game engines suck. JavaScript is slow and awful for large-scale software, even today. Frameworks which compile into JavaScript and WASM (e.g. libGDX) compile incorrectly, leading to obscure awful bugs, and they're still slow because JS. Your best bet is a general-purpose game engine like Unity or Godot which can export to web, but still, the web export is often broken, missing features, and just slow. Even tiny games I've played on itch.io either don't load or play super slow, and sometimes that might be the dev's fault, but often I think it's the state of web-gamedev in general.

socialist_coder 5y ago
> Your best bet is a general-purpose game engine like Unity or Godot which can export to web Totally disagree about Unity. Unity's web export is awful. If you want a good web game you need to use a web-native engine like Pixi, PlayCanvas, or Phaser. I guess the Haxe & Godot tools are good too but I've never used them. The huge advantage with using a Javascript/Typescript based game engine is that you can use the latest & greatest build tools like Webpack, and the latest ECMA/javascript features, instead of some proprietary tool chain that hasn't seen a major updated in years. I think mobile game companies who have only been using Unity and have all their games built in Unity will have a hard time transitioning to mobile because you just cannot use Unity to make good web games. You have to rebuild them in a new engine. But, if you use a web game engine, you can still target mobile. So, I would not use Unity for any new mobile/web game projects.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Except Unity on mobile will be able to take advantage of Vulkan, Metal and GL ES 3.2, while WebGL is stuck in ES 3.0 subset and who knows when WebGPU (with a MVP 1.0) will come out into stable.

socialist_coder 5y ago

Facebook Instant is actually a pretty incredible platform, IMO. Tons of games on there, available to play with 1 click and no install. They all load pretty fast and the performance is great. Almost none are built with Unity. It's very very rare to find one that isn't built with a web-native game engine. Check it out if you've never seen it, you will be impressed. https://www.facebook.com/instantgames/ https://www.facebook.com/instantgames/ The crappy thing is that iOS doesn't let you do IAPs on FB Instant. So you can only have IAPs on Android & Desktop. Ad monetization works everywhere though.

bstar77 5y ago

I agree that instant games are and will continue to be desirable for a sizable audience. Correlating that to Adobe Flash completely lost me. My NES games are instant and that preceded Flash by decades. In fact, I think the 8-bit era inspires game devs today far more than the early-mid 2000's browser games.

wiradikusuma 5y ago

"instant games"... here I am 10 minutes down, the game is still loading at 11%

mrkramer 5y ago

The future of gaming is cloud gaming. Moore's law is our friend.

ogurechny 5y ago

Side note about “instant multiplayer Minecraft”: Minetest is as instant as possible for a native application: you download the client (about 25 MB), then connect to any server, no matter which games and mods run there, and have all the needed assets streamed from it, too. Non-existing nickname is all the identification player needs, IRC-style. It is even inter-operable across major versions and forks, at least to some extent. Of course, it has been this way because it has a typical relatively small and tight open source community, but, from a cursory look, it is possible for a public server to have a protected spawn/sightseeing area with rules and information, then (auto)grant new players who want to participate various gameplay privileges based on their progress. It doesn't seem that web client built in the same manner is impossible. What's impossible is, most likely, telling a browser to give you a gigabyte or two of memory to keep the local world area, then step aside and forget about it.

ch00se 5y ago

Great article! Thanks so much for talking about FGL. I'm one of the co-founders, and helping Flash developers and portals was definitely a special time that I remember fondly.

Ronson 5y ago

By far, the worst thing I ever done was Game Development. I poured years of starting my career into it. I worked at Sony in the UK then Bizarre Creations and had a wee go at Rockstar North. Bizarre Creations was amazing, and everything else was terrible. Not too long after, the financial crisis hit and I found myself working on the Flash Runtime just to earn a crust (my partner and I had just got a house and her father was diagnosed with cancer so I was kind of stuck in the wrong location). Then Stevo came along and that ended any hope of continuing with Flash Runtime. I eked out some work with Scaleform. Then Typescript came out, then Angular, and now I work 1% of the effort for 10000%+ uptake on my salary and never looked back. Game development is genuinely a mugs game and I'd urge everyone not to do it.

kmeisthax 5y ago

Excellent article. One thing I do want to point out is that it's recently come to light that Apple actually did try to push for Flash Player on the iPhone, and later, on the iPad. It came down to two problems: 1. Surmountable engineering problems. Flash on phones ran like crap... like everything else on early iPhone prototypes. Apple did a shitton of work to get the iPhone to fit on hilariously underpowered hardware, a journey Adobe never really undertook 2. The CEO of Adobe wouldn't take Steve Jobs's calls Adobe was disinvited from the iPhone party not because it competed with the App Store (they didn't even HAVE an App Store at launch), but because Adobe was (and still is) a company that fundamentally does not understand touch input or mobile devices. Or anything that requires substantial engineering investment. Hell, Flash wasn't even their baby, their competitor Macromedia did most of the work. Even AS3 had to have been in development pre-aquisition (given the stories I heard about them trying to license Java).