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You cannot find Flash experiences on the web, nor even Flash-like experiences on the web. There has been no replacement. This post seems to confuse capability

You cannot find Flash experiences on the web, nor even Flash-like experiences on the web. There has been no replacement. This post seems to confuse capability with actuality. Sure, we have the technical capability for a Flash-like player and authoring tool, but it does not exist.

nicholsonpk 5y ago
Maybe I misunderstand what experiences you are looking for, but if you go to itch.io and choose HTML5 do you not see the things that used to be made in Flash?
- perryizgr8 5y ago
  I don't know if it's just a case of nostalgia but itch.io looks like a wasteland compared to newgrounds.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    The market is smaller and there are fewer experiences (mostly due to native mobile gaming) but those experiences do rival (and exceed) what was done with flash back in the day.
- andai 5y ago
  On that note, Flash games were basically web games (back in the day Java filled the same role to some degree, eg with SodaPlay (RIP)), and web games as a whole seem to have gone away to some degree, I'm wondering why that is. I guess they don't work very well on mobile (relative to mobile games that run fullscreen), and most (~50%) web traffic is mobile now?
  - JoeyJoJoJr 5y ago
    There has been a bit of a resurgence of browser games with Friday Night Funken. I feel as the app stores continue to stagnate, the open and creative nature of the web platform will foster a new market for easily distributable games.
- JoeyJoJoJr 5y ago
  There are more specialised tools that can export games for HTML5, but Flash was extremely general purpose. In my time as a Flash developer, I worked on web animations, games, websites (not a great use-case), digital signage, touch screen kiosks, eLearning products, tutorial animations, and I didn’t even touch any of the more enterprisey flex stuff. You can do all that now with various tools but the ecosystem is so fragmented that you often need specialists for each of them. The Flash tools had so much reach that you could bounce between such wildly different projects with very little friction. As a consultant it was amazing, you just did it in Flash. Nowadays there are so many competing and fragmented solutions that you need to evaluate then glue together.
shkkmo 5y ago
You are the one confusing "player" and "authoring tool" as there absolutely are players with all the functionality of the flash player and more, they are just called browsers. What's more there absolutely are "html5" experiences that rival the old flash experiences. In most ways these experiences are much better. Perhaps as an old commerical flash developer youbhave a rosy memory of flash in the naughts. Back in the day, the only time I wasn't pissed to see flash loading was when I played flash games, every other use of flash was generally awful and I would usually immediately close a page if it started loading flash. As much as I hate the bloat and SPAification of the web, it is still far better than what most sites did with flash. The demise of flash is complicated and has a lot to do with the rise of mobile. Android did support flash but even on that platform, native games simply outperformed flash games and the market demand shifted. If Apple had supported flash on iOS, this shift would probably have been slower but flash would still have lost out.
- somehnacct3757 5y ago
  Adobe Air could target mobile platforms with negligible degradation and generated swfs for web, too. I and most other serious flash devs in this era had a toolchain where you built once in AS3 and published to web and mobile using frameworks like Starling. Flash died not because it couldn't do mobile. Thinking this is part of the hit job orchestrated by Apple. Flash died because browser games can't be taxed by Apple. The same thing is happening today with progressive web apps. Ask yourself what Apple could have against those, and now look backwards at their stance on Flash.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    > Flash died not because it couldn't do mobile. I never said it couldn't do mobile. I said it couldn't do mobile as well as native. Flash died faster because of apple, but was always going to die due to the combination of the rise of app stores, mobile battery issues, and the advancement of web standards. Apple did the work to integrate flash into the iPhone before they rejected it. I think it is interesting that Apple gets all the blame here since the decline of flash also coincides pretty directly with it's acquisition by Adobe. Youtube's early moves to offer non-flash video also had significant effects. While I am a big critic to Apple's approach to called gardens, the decision against flash was as much prescient as it was causative of the decline of flash.

nicholsonpk 5y ago

Maybe I misunderstand what experiences you are looking for, but if you go to itch.io and choose HTML5 do you not see the things that used to be made in Flash?

perryizgr8 5y ago
I don't know if it's just a case of nostalgia but itch.io looks like a wasteland compared to newgrounds.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  The market is smaller and there are fewer experiences (mostly due to native mobile gaming) but those experiences do rival (and exceed) what was done with flash back in the day.
andai 5y ago
On that note, Flash games were basically web games (back in the day Java filled the same role to some degree, eg with SodaPlay (RIP)), and web games as a whole seem to have gone away to some degree, I'm wondering why that is. I guess they don't work very well on mobile (relative to mobile games that run fullscreen), and most (~50%) web traffic is mobile now?
- JoeyJoJoJr 5y ago
  There has been a bit of a resurgence of browser games with Friday Night Funken. I feel as the app stores continue to stagnate, the open and creative nature of the web platform will foster a new market for easily distributable games.
JoeyJoJoJr 5y ago
There are more specialised tools that can export games for HTML5, but Flash was extremely general purpose. In my time as a Flash developer, I worked on web animations, games, websites (not a great use-case), digital signage, touch screen kiosks, eLearning products, tutorial animations, and I didn’t even touch any of the more enterprisey flex stuff. You can do all that now with various tools but the ecosystem is so fragmented that you often need specialists for each of them. The Flash tools had so much reach that you could bounce between such wildly different projects with very little friction. As a consultant it was amazing, you just did it in Flash. Nowadays there are so many competing and fragmented solutions that you need to evaluate then glue together.

shkkmo 5y ago

You are the one confusing "player" and "authoring tool" as there absolutely are players with all the functionality of the flash player and more, they are just called browsers. What's more there absolutely are "html5" experiences that rival the old flash experiences. In most ways these experiences are much better. Perhaps as an old commerical flash developer youbhave a rosy memory of flash in the naughts. Back in the day, the only time I wasn't pissed to see flash loading was when I played flash games, every other use of flash was generally awful and I would usually immediately close a page if it started loading flash. As much as I hate the bloat and SPAification of the web, it is still far better than what most sites did with flash. The demise of flash is complicated and has a lot to do with the rise of mobile. Android did support flash but even on that platform, native games simply outperformed flash games and the market demand shifted. If Apple had supported flash on iOS, this shift would probably have been slower but flash would still have lost out.

somehnacct3757 5y ago
Adobe Air could target mobile platforms with negligible degradation and generated swfs for web, too. I and most other serious flash devs in this era had a toolchain where you built once in AS3 and published to web and mobile using frameworks like Starling. Flash died not because it couldn't do mobile. Thinking this is part of the hit job orchestrated by Apple. Flash died because browser games can't be taxed by Apple. The same thing is happening today with progressive web apps. Ask yourself what Apple could have against those, and now look backwards at their stance on Flash.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  > Flash died not because it couldn't do mobile. I never said it couldn't do mobile. I said it couldn't do mobile as well as native. Flash died faster because of apple, but was always going to die due to the combination of the rise of app stores, mobile battery issues, and the advancement of web standards. Apple did the work to integrate flash into the iPhone before they rejected it. I think it is interesting that Apple gets all the blame here since the decline of flash also coincides pretty directly with it's acquisition by Adobe. Youtube's early moves to offer non-flash video also had significant effects. While I am a big critic to Apple's approach to called gardens, the decision against flash was as much prescient as it was causative of the decline of flash.