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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

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!
- OmarShehata 5y ago
  I disagree that Mochi was as or more important than FGL. Perhaps this was true for developers who released a lot of games and could rack up consistent significant monthly views across on all their games. I remember a big question was always: should you self sponsor if you can't get high enough bids for sponsorship? If they're willing to pay $5k to put their ad on your game, why shouldn't you capture that revenue yourself? The answer was for most developers it was difficult to capture that value without some kind of centralized game portal where you could redirect this traffic and keep those users coming back. So even if the sponsor was paying $5k and still making money off that game, it was unlikely you could make anywhere near that amount just from Mochi ads or similar.
  - Marazan 5y ago
    Oh for serious game devs FGL was absolutely the most important monetisation stream by some distance no doubt. But for people just starting out and, say, knocking out a game in a weekend, unpolished, raw Mochi was incredible. With zero effort (beyond spending a couple of weekends making games) I had 3 figure annual revenue from games that would have never ever gotten sponsorship. If you were a 16 year old hacking stuff together in Flash that would have been hugely motivating. That's would drove the sheer volume and variety of Flash games. If I could apply the knowledge I have now back to past me I'd have easily been able to get 4 figure annual revenue swiftly and that would have let me focus on putting the polish on FGL level serious sponsorship games. ( I did make one full stand alone game and it flopped, I've made more money from people playing the demo than from full game purchases)
jayd16 5y ago
We had instant browser games and the gold rush of mobile ate them. The AppStore stack had better discoverability and native performance...a lot of benefits, really. Why would we all go back to the browser? I feel like a large leap is being made that instant games will win back users when their instant-ness didn't keep them in the first place. I don't feel like any catalyst is explored enough to be convincing.
- larsiusprime 5y ago
  > had better discoverability I don't agree, particularly in the case of mobile App stores where the top charts are consistently dominated by the same few games.
- utzucto 5y ago
  I think the increasing difficulty of being discovered on ever-growing platforms like the App Store is/will push more games to other places (though I don't know how instant-game platforms will build userbases like native app stores). Also, I don't think people moved away from instant games because the instantness wasn't enough. I think it's more about what devices kids (and people in general) are using for everything else; people who are playing mobile games now probably would have been playing flash games a few years ago. I'm kindof spitballing here, but I wonder if all the chromebooks that are used in schools now are or will be pushing kids back to online games platforms like the old flash sites
Dracophoenix 5y ago
>> 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. If anything, I see modern platforms using more off-the-shelf and standards based tech rather than reinventing the wheel. It used to be the case that you'd have to download not just Flash, but Shockwave, Silverlight, the Java applet plugin, Unity Web Player, and all sorts of proprietary plugins just to play games built on whatever proprietary game engine and scripting language came with it. It was like downloading individual video codecs in the early 90's before the advent of Quicktime. Nowadays, you can play fully fledged 3-D games on a Web Application built with any game engine, any language, on nearly any browser of your choosing. No plugins needed. I don't think web games are going to be siloed to particular platforms any time soon. What I do think is that web games are now competing with siloed AAA games. And this might be a good thing overall for competition in that space. For a long time Flash and mobile games were also-rans simply because of the limited computing power. Very few were of such caliber either in graphics or playability as to compete with contemporary installable or console games and were very often mimicries of those very same games. In the West, mobile games underwent a revolution with Angry Birds and Infinity Blade, there hasn't been a killer app that's reinvigorated the browser game craze of the Y2K era just yet. But Epic's interest in itch.io might be hinting at an attempt in that direction.
- larsiusprime 5y ago
  The difference is, that even though Flash was proprietary in tools (The Flash IDE) and the playback engine (The Flash Player), what was open was distribution, discovery, and marketplace. You didn't pay a tax to adobe to distribute your games and you weren't limited to Adobe.com as the one place to go for Flash games. To be clear this was not because of Adobe's benevolence, but their incompetence -- believe me they tried to find ways to tax Flash, but they just couldn't figure it out until the horse was out of the barn. And this was a good thing for the ecosystem. Honestly, Adobe stubbornly refusing to open source the flash player is one of the things that cemented its demise. Compare that to say, Roblox. If you make a Roblox game, not only will it only run within the Roblox environment, it is only able to exist on exactly one website and one app -- Roblox. Roblox owns the entire stack top to bottom. You can't take your game anywhere else.
danShumway 5y ago
> 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! Brevity is a good skill, but given the choice between too concise and too long, too long is probably the better direction to err. I'm always happy to see articles like this on HN. I'm not sure I agree with all of it, but it's generally pretty thoughtful and covered some interesting points I hadn't thought about before. Thanks for writing it!
bartwe 5y ago
If wasm/webgpu doesn't get too limited due to coinminers, 'meltdown style' vulnerabilities and platform holders feeling challenged. And some solution for preloading/caching/preinstalling large (many gigabytes) assets are added. Than yeah webgames have a very bright future ahead, assuming a method of monetization is found.
utzucto 5y ago
I like the article, it's got a lot of the same threads that I've been thinking about recently while developing an iOS app and a browser game (unrelated to each other). It's also interesting to learn about how the flash sites I used to play when I was younger actually made and distributed money. Back then I just assumed the devs made some cut of the banner ad money or something. As I was reading it, I somewhat agreed with the sentiment I see in some of the comments around that the article had a bit of the "old person discovers new trend and concludes its the future of everything" (which you see a fair amount with VR, on Stadia/cloud gaming, the "metaverse," and other things you mentioned FNF doesn't do) but this comment tempers that feeling. At the very least, I think that this is an interesting showcase of a project that is successful outside of the big platforms and I agree that it's a direction that things could be going in to some extent. Speaking about the fact it's free & open source, I think that people --in this case the games industry people to whom this doesn't make sense-- sometimes put too much weight on the decision to publish source code. I think it's about focusing on what differentiates your product from others, and in this case it seems like the game differentiates itself with music and personality rather than complex code, thus bandcamp & kickstarter. There's probably a lot of software products that don't gain anything from being closed source, and I'm no Stallman. As a bit of an aside, I appreciate you mentioning the fact that there's a whole several continents of people who aren't American, or NA, or English-speaking, etc. and aren't necessarily talked about when it comes to diversity. Diversity is often based around US/CAN sensibilities around identity and other things. Obv very difficult to fully consider the entire Earth's population in everything you do, but just considering the fact that not everyone is in the same place or can have the same powerful hardware/internet connection is worthwhile. I'm absolutely not perfect in this regard either. I wonder if the increasing use of chromebooks in school (revealing my US bias) is/will push this trend forward as well. I don't use chrome, so maybe there already is an ecosystem of games in the chrome app store.
- larsiusprime 5y ago
  Yeah so to clarify my bit about open source I have two points: 1) It's made FNF very easy to mod, and these mods drive a lot of viral engagement with the game. If you scan social media you'll see that this is what keeps the community excited and engaged when the authors themselves are not putting out updates. 2) I mention it because many people see being open source as a liability because of concerns about cloning. Seeing a FOSS game like this pull in literal millions shows that at least in this one case, FOSS games aren't literally doomed to failure because of being FOSS, is all. So my position is, no actual players care that you have a github repo with source available, unless that actually affects them somehow, and in FNF's case I argue it does affect them by enabling the community to keep making more weird content for the game (though it could be achieved in other ways, like using a modding API like [polymod](https://github.com/larsiusprime/polymod https://github.com/larsiusprime/polymod), which it has been integrating with recently).

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!
OmarShehata 5y ago
I disagree that Mochi was as or more important than FGL. Perhaps this was true for developers who released a lot of games and could rack up consistent significant monthly views across on all their games. I remember a big question was always: should you self sponsor if you can't get high enough bids for sponsorship? If they're willing to pay $5k to put their ad on your game, why shouldn't you capture that revenue yourself? The answer was for most developers it was difficult to capture that value without some kind of centralized game portal where you could redirect this traffic and keep those users coming back. So even if the sponsor was paying $5k and still making money off that game, it was unlikely you could make anywhere near that amount just from Mochi ads or similar.
- Marazan 5y ago
  Oh for serious game devs FGL was absolutely the most important monetisation stream by some distance no doubt. But for people just starting out and, say, knocking out a game in a weekend, unpolished, raw Mochi was incredible. With zero effort (beyond spending a couple of weekends making games) I had 3 figure annual revenue from games that would have never ever gotten sponsorship. If you were a 16 year old hacking stuff together in Flash that would have been hugely motivating. That's would drove the sheer volume and variety of Flash games. If I could apply the knowledge I have now back to past me I'd have easily been able to get 4 figure annual revenue swiftly and that would have let me focus on putting the polish on FGL level serious sponsorship games. ( I did make one full stand alone game and it flopped, I've made more money from people playing the demo than from full game purchases)

jayd16 5y ago

We had instant browser games and the gold rush of mobile ate them. The AppStore stack had better discoverability and native performance...a lot of benefits, really. Why would we all go back to the browser? I feel like a large leap is being made that instant games will win back users when their instant-ness didn't keep them in the first place. I don't feel like any catalyst is explored enough to be convincing.

larsiusprime 5y ago
> had better discoverability I don't agree, particularly in the case of mobile App stores where the top charts are consistently dominated by the same few games.
utzucto 5y ago
I think the increasing difficulty of being discovered on ever-growing platforms like the App Store is/will push more games to other places (though I don't know how instant-game platforms will build userbases like native app stores). Also, I don't think people moved away from instant games because the instantness wasn't enough. I think it's more about what devices kids (and people in general) are using for everything else; people who are playing mobile games now probably would have been playing flash games a few years ago. I'm kindof spitballing here, but I wonder if all the chromebooks that are used in schools now are or will be pushing kids back to online games platforms like the old flash sites

Dracophoenix 5y ago

>> 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. If anything, I see modern platforms using more off-the-shelf and standards based tech rather than reinventing the wheel. It used to be the case that you'd have to download not just Flash, but Shockwave, Silverlight, the Java applet plugin, Unity Web Player, and all sorts of proprietary plugins just to play games built on whatever proprietary game engine and scripting language came with it. It was like downloading individual video codecs in the early 90's before the advent of Quicktime. Nowadays, you can play fully fledged 3-D games on a Web Application built with any game engine, any language, on nearly any browser of your choosing. No plugins needed. I don't think web games are going to be siloed to particular platforms any time soon. What I do think is that web games are now competing with siloed AAA games. And this might be a good thing overall for competition in that space. For a long time Flash and mobile games were also-rans simply because of the limited computing power. Very few were of such caliber either in graphics or playability as to compete with contemporary installable or console games and were very often mimicries of those very same games. In the West, mobile games underwent a revolution with Angry Birds and Infinity Blade, there hasn't been a killer app that's reinvigorated the browser game craze of the Y2K era just yet. But Epic's interest in itch.io might be hinting at an attempt in that direction.

larsiusprime 5y ago
The difference is, that even though Flash was proprietary in tools (The Flash IDE) and the playback engine (The Flash Player), what was open was distribution, discovery, and marketplace. You didn't pay a tax to adobe to distribute your games and you weren't limited to Adobe.com as the one place to go for Flash games. To be clear this was not because of Adobe's benevolence, but their incompetence -- believe me they tried to find ways to tax Flash, but they just couldn't figure it out until the horse was out of the barn. And this was a good thing for the ecosystem. Honestly, Adobe stubbornly refusing to open source the flash player is one of the things that cemented its demise. Compare that to say, Roblox. If you make a Roblox game, not only will it only run within the Roblox environment, it is only able to exist on exactly one website and one app -- Roblox. Roblox owns the entire stack top to bottom. You can't take your game anywhere else.

danShumway 5y ago

> 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! Brevity is a good skill, but given the choice between too concise and too long, too long is probably the better direction to err. I'm always happy to see articles like this on HN. I'm not sure I agree with all of it, but it's generally pretty thoughtful and covered some interesting points I hadn't thought about before. Thanks for writing it!

bartwe 5y ago

If wasm/webgpu doesn't get too limited due to coinminers, 'meltdown style' vulnerabilities and platform holders feeling challenged. And some solution for preloading/caching/preinstalling large (many gigabytes) assets are added. Than yeah webgames have a very bright future ahead, assuming a method of monetization is found.

utzucto 5y ago

I like the article, it's got a lot of the same threads that I've been thinking about recently while developing an iOS app and a browser game (unrelated to each other). It's also interesting to learn about how the flash sites I used to play when I was younger actually made and distributed money. Back then I just assumed the devs made some cut of the banner ad money or something. As I was reading it, I somewhat agreed with the sentiment I see in some of the comments around that the article had a bit of the "old person discovers new trend and concludes its the future of everything" (which you see a fair amount with VR, on Stadia/cloud gaming, the "metaverse," and other things you mentioned FNF doesn't do) but this comment tempers that feeling. At the very least, I think that this is an interesting showcase of a project that is successful outside of the big platforms and I agree that it's a direction that things could be going in to some extent. Speaking about the fact it's free & open source, I think that people --in this case the games industry people to whom this doesn't make sense-- sometimes put too much weight on the decision to publish source code. I think it's about focusing on what differentiates your product from others, and in this case it seems like the game differentiates itself with music and personality rather than complex code, thus bandcamp & kickstarter. There's probably a lot of software products that don't gain anything from being closed source, and I'm no Stallman. As a bit of an aside, I appreciate you mentioning the fact that there's a whole several continents of people who aren't American, or NA, or English-speaking, etc. and aren't necessarily talked about when it comes to diversity. Diversity is often based around US/CAN sensibilities around identity and other things. Obv very difficult to fully consider the entire Earth's population in everything you do, but just considering the fact that not everyone is in the same place or can have the same powerful hardware/internet connection is worthwhile. I'm absolutely not perfect in this regard either. I wonder if the increasing use of chromebooks in school (revealing my US bias) is/will push this trend forward as well. I don't use chrome, so maybe there already is an ecosystem of games in the chrome app store.

larsiusprime 5y ago
Yeah so to clarify my bit about open source I have two points: 1) It's made FNF very easy to mod, and these mods drive a lot of viral engagement with the game. If you scan social media you'll see that this is what keeps the community excited and engaged when the authors themselves are not putting out updates. 2) I mention it because many people see being open source as a liability because of concerns about cloning. Seeing a FOSS game like this pull in literal millions shows that at least in this one case, FOSS games aren't literally doomed to failure because of being FOSS, is all. So my position is, no actual players care that you have a github repo with source available, unless that actually affects them somehow, and in FNF's case I argue it does affect them by enabling the community to keep making more weird content for the game (though it could be achieved in other ways, like using a modding API like [polymod](https://github.com/larsiusprime/polymod https://github.com/larsiusprime/polymod), which it has been integrating with recently).