10 ms·

Miniclip to Discontinue Desktop Site and Transition Exclusively to Mobile Games

182 points by tech234a 5y ago

gamesbrainiac 5y ago
Miniclip, Armorgames, Kongregate were my childhood. I guess this is the end of an era.
extheat 5y ago
That's a shame. Ever since the removal of Flash from Chrome I think it's been a downhill ride for web-based games. I used to love going through the catalog of quirky "minigames" if you will every now and then to pass time. On top of the decline of Flash Player, I think mobile games definitely hit the nail in the coffin for them.
- notRobot 5y ago
  Yeah :( It's hard to find fun games that can be played in the browser nowadays. They definitely do exist, but there's no where near the variety that we used to have when Flash was still a thing.
  - defenestration 5y ago
    I loved the days that Kongregate.com was thriving. Today, Armor Games is still up and running. It has quite some gems worth exploring: https://armorgames.com/games/rating#games https://armorgames.com/games/rating#games
    - Riverheart 5y ago
      Armor Games has been porting classics to Steam. We've got Scriptwelder games and Crush the Castle.
  - Tijdreiziger 5y ago
    My go-to for these types of games is itch.io. https://itch.io/games/html5 https://itch.io/games/html5
    - smaudet 5y ago
      My experience with that is it usually never works, and for whatever reason the games never seem compelling. Not sure why, flash games never had that problem. They were always full games with rich graphics and often a story. I literally tried to pull up itch while tablet shopping yesterday - the site never rendered on the tablets and the one game I tried about crashed the whole tablet. Audio/video worked fine. I'm sure if I sat down at a high powered beefy windows desktop maybe they'd work - I remember flash working great on 1GHz celeron processors with maybe 1 or 2 GB of memory and windows 95. Html games are still a bunch of nonsense, on average.
      - Tijdreiziger 5y ago
        Some games can be iffy, but I haven't really had any major problems with the site. My computer is from 2015, so not exactly high-end. You could also install the desktop client, then you can play all the games easily (including the non-web-based ones). I'm partial to this one: https://leef6010.itch.io/projectkat https://leef6010.itch.io/projectkat
      - 29083011397778 5y ago
        I just pulled up "Farmers Stealing Tanks" on my BlackBerry KeyOne and played for a minute. It was playable (though not perfect), and that's on a 5 year old phone with a chipset that emphasized battery life over performance.
    - dleslie 5y ago
      Interestingly, it appears a great many of those are unity games and won't run on phones.
  - jimbob45 5y ago
    Newgrounds is still alive and kicking. They’ve even ported all their Flash games to be playable on modern devices to boot! That said, I’m not going to pretend like I go there frequently either. I just don’t have time to blow on popcorn experiences anymore.
  - unwind 5y ago
    I'm certainly not an expert but I think you're comparing apples and oranges a little. Js and canvas is a code execution environment, but Flash had a polished authoring environment which I believe made it easier for less-technical people to get stuff happening.
  - andrepd 5y ago
    Unfortunately, it's hard to find fun games on mobile as well. Mobiles games are an utter disgrace nowadays. Can you even call them games? They're an optimised engagement loop with some gameplay in between the "buy platinum coins" and "spin to win" popups.
- hackernewds 5y ago
  Google decided to, and successfully, killed a whole software system. In hindsight, what was the reason, and was it justified?
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    Let's be honest here: what killed Flash was years of neglect by Adobe. Google removing it from Chrome was a downstream effect, not a cause.
    - jterrys 5y ago
      Yeah, I'm old enough to remember how absolutely fucking garbage Flash was, and the source of many a web-based malware that haunted many a Windows user. I don't really blame Apple's decision not to support it. There's no way Jobs would've allowed such a disease prone plugin infesting his new platform.
      - smaudet 5y ago
        Are you sure it's any better? Last time I've used a JS heavy site the UX was just utterly awful. Flash had bad bits to be sure but it could be snappy. I had hope we could do better but a lot of sites seem as bad or worse on arguably better hardware. I'm not sure the tech stack was ever to blame...people would have eventually fixed the bad parts of flash.
        duskwuff 5y ago
        > Last time I've used a JS heavy site the UX was just utterly awful. That's an issue with the web site, not the underlying technology. > […] people would have eventually fixed the bad parts of flash. The Flash plugin was a closed-source component. (Various attempts were made at open-source substitutes, but none ever reached a fully usable state.) The only people who could have "fixed the bad parts of Flash" were Adobe employees, and they didn't.
      - satellite2 5y ago
- john567 5y ago
  At this point in time. In what way was Flash superior to JavaScript and canvas? There was even SWF player implementations in JavaScript at this point in time. Somehow, I don't think the death of Flash had much to do with it. Rather, the app ecosystem replaced a space that, that for a limited time, was occupied by Flash based web stuff.
  - naoqj 5y ago
    There's nothing as good and as easy as Flash was to create 2D games. It was wysiwyg. Even kids could do it.
  - someotherperson 5y ago
    Is there authoring/creation tooling anywhere near what Flash had? I made Flash stuff when I was a lot younger and it was insanely straight forward thanks to the tooling. I haven’t tried to animate anything since… 2007 perhaps? Does JS or canvas have a similar experience to author content?
    - shoozza 5y ago
      Depends on what you need. For simple stuff Wrick Editor[0] might be good enough. [0] https://www.wickeditor.com/ https://www.wickeditor.com/
    - rchaud 5y ago
      Tumult Hype: a Mac application that uses a graphical timeline UI to manipulate CSS and JSS for animation, and includes a physics engine to simulate collisions, bounces and things needed for game design. Exports to HTML, GIF and MP4. https://tumult.com/hype/ https://tumult.com/hype/
  - andybak 5y ago
    Authoring tools.
  - cableshaft 5y ago
    Former Flash game developer here. A big part of it was artists and coders could use the same tool. An artist could create some flash animations and then I as a coder would go in and hook up all the code to make it functional without having to spend any extra effort to make the graphics or animation work (in other platforms you'd have to pack sprite sheets, color encoding, sometimes fight memory (at least I did on iPhone 4 back in the day), and then you'd have to set up all the animations manually and get each one working. With Flash I was just sent an FLA, browsed through all the animations, went "awesome", and started setting up hitboxes and dropping them into the game. Like I've wanted to port some of my Flash games to HTML5, but the intense frame by frame animation would be a bear to export and hook up in other formats. And non-frame-by-frame animation was easy enough that I could help fill in the gaps when needed, no big deal. I even made a few simple animations just for the hell of it back then since it was so easy to work with. I eventually migrated to console dev with XNA, then mobile dev with iOS, then some 3D development with Unity, and I've dabbled with Monogame, Phaser, Java, Pico-8, PlayDate, Unreal Engine, and currently working on a game in Unity again, since it's pretty much your only choice right now besides Unreal if you want good VR support. But yeah, nothing I've worked with has felt quite as nice as Flash as far as synergy between art and code, especially 2D art. Examples: I teamed up with an artist to make a 7 character head to head fighting game: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/187047 https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/187047 I teamed up with another artist to make a richly animated (espcially the boss) short platformer.: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/116067 https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/116067
- giffarage 5y ago
  If there was a demand, game developers would find a way. It’s just that kids are playing games on phones these days.
- MivLives 5y ago
  I think it was mostly mobile games. Why make games for small amounts of money when you can make actual money on the app store. The decline was happening even before Flash was removed from chrome.
lykr0n 5y ago
It's a shame that they can't transition it to a read-only archive type site, where everything is still accessible and playable- jut no new updates or content.
- drBonkers 5y ago
  What would it take to do something like this?
  - andai 5y ago
    Literally nothing? Just leave it as is. There is a browser extension called Ruffle that lets you play older (AS2) Flash games, and eventually it will support newer (AS3) Flash games too. Edit: most users won't have the Ruffle extension, so the one great thing they could do is add it to the site with a single <script> tag :)
    - Otek 5y ago
      False. Bandwidth and hosting and keeping site working is not nothing.
      - hackernewds 5y ago
        As long as they're breakeven keep it running? I guess that also takes employees and not many are interested in just maintaining a website
        antifa 5y ago
        I never heard of the site until now, how hard would it be to convert it to static?
        andai 5y ago
        Flash games are static content (except for high scores). A Flash game is just a SWF file, typically a couple MB (or KB!). If you'd like to experience the games that were available on Miniclip back in the day, your best bet is FlashPoint, a big offline archive of Flash games (ships with integrated FlashPlayer and a nice UI to search for games). https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/ https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/
cush 5y ago
Pouring one out for miniclip.com. For the countless hours of fun, covertly playing flash games in my high school computer lab when the teacher wasn't looking. Legend.
- hackernewds 5y ago
  Boom boom volleyball was the best
  - susodapop 5y ago
    Even fifteen years on, I ocasionally remember the cheat code “GETEMOUT” for BBV.
- andrepd 5y ago
  Heli Attack 3 was dope. So were the nitrome games. And of course Club Penguin and Runescape.
PrayagS 5y ago
So long friend...
andai 5y ago
Is there an article or announcement here? On my phone it just takes me to their App Store page.
- sincerely 5y ago
  It's a banner on the desktop website. They link a FAQ that goes into more detail: https://support.miniclip.com/hc/en-us/articles/5091169897617 https://support.miniclip.com/hc/en-us/articles/5091169897617
  - just-tom 5y ago
    This should have been the link, not the app store link that informs nothing.
    - tech234a 5y ago
      The link points to their homepage, though the site might behave differently on mobile.
gundamdoubleO 5y ago
So many creative and interesting games and animations were hosted on sites like this and Newgrounds. I spent so much time on these sites growing up that they shaped my interests, hobbies and gave me a sense of community. It's sad to see these parts of the internet slowly disappear and I'm glad Newgrounds is still able to harbor a niche community for now.
aniforprez 5y ago
Man, I'm so sad to hear this. Miniclip was the absolute best and I've had so much fun on the site going all the way back more than 14 years where I loved playing all those flash games. I remember having a ton of fun with some of the sidescrolling shoot-'em-ups that had a surprising degree of polish My favorite developers to come from that era was Nitrome[0]. They made so many classics like Skywire, Final Ninja and Cheese Dreams. They're still making games and have ported a large number of their Flash games to HTML5 to play on the browser. They're now making a Shovel Knight spinoff which was a pleasant surprise https://www.nitrome.com/ https://www.nitrome.com/
- Max_Ehrlich 5y ago
  Nitrome was the best! I especially loved their Steamlands game. You build these tanks to fight pirate tanks in a steampunk England. http://www.nitrome.com/games/steamlandsplayerpack/ http://www.nitrome.com/games/steamlandsplayerpack/
smittywerben 5y ago
Miniclip sucked. It was all about Addicting Games and XGenStudios. But the inferior Miniclip game selection (for normies) made me appreciate the other flash sites more. Miniclip was reliable though. It was a nice era. I feel bittersweet about this.
- culi 5y ago
  Kongregate was my main site. Every game had a chatbox so there was a lot of community building. And it was really built around creators as well, allowing any user to submit a game. As a result there was a ton of exclusive content there It's probably second only to Newgrounds in terms of driving a creator-centric vision of flash gaming/art Armor Games caught on to a little bit later
- DavidPeiffer 5y ago
  It's bringing back lots of memories looking through the XGenStudios catalog [1]. I remember playing Motherload when I was in middle school, around the time it was released (2005). It was a neat game, but was really difficult, with games lasting multiple days, a couple hours per day. I replayed it a couple years ago and was done in about 3 hours. I see they have Super Motherload, released in 2013. I may have to check it out. [1] http://www.xgenstudios.com/games/ http://www.xgenstudios.com/games/
Otek 5y ago
I will not, like others, cry over Miniclip because the truth is that I have looked there maybe twice in the last 5 years. But for sure I would also like to pay my respects and thank you for the time I could spend having fun there several years ago.
- bbx 5y ago
  I agree. A lot of comments here are in past tense: “Miniclip was…”, “the games were…”, “I loved…”, “they used to…” You can reminisce the good times but you can’t be sad they’re transitioning when their core audience (including me) haven’t visited the website in almost 10 years.
mkl95 5y ago
I loved Miniclip in the late 2000s. Their UX went downhill after that.
jterrys 5y ago
It's really a shame that Adobe's absolute garbage treatment of Flash ended up causing, in my opinion, roughly a decade and a half or so of young childrens' and teens' disinterest in making video games. That niche was somewhat filled partly by Roblox and Minecraft, and today it's getting easier and easier to spin something up in Unity, but there's never been anything quite comparable to the level of simplicity of just making some bullshit in Fireworks and fiddling around with Flash for a few hours while recording audio on a shitty microphone and splicing up old pictures to make a dumb joke. Ah nostalgia
- wodenokoto 5y ago
  On one hand, I kinda stand by being against flash, but on the other hand, we aren't really at a better place today than when Flash was all over the place.
  - m12k 5y ago
    I just wish someone had made a good Flash/ActionScript3 -> JS+HTML-Canvas compiler. There's no reason we couldn't have kept the authoring tools just because we got rid of runtime and all its security issues.
    - samwillis 5y ago
      We now have Ruffle which does more or less what Adobe should have done 10 years ago. https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle If Adobe had seen their ban from the iPhone as a challenge to make Flash player capable of running without a plug-in they would dominate so many areas today. Flex would have become a viable platform to develop web apps/PWAs with - effectively sitting in the same position as what Flutter is doing today (Although I don’t believe Flutter is a one size fits all universal toolkit). I suppose they tried with PhoneGap but without Flash/Flex, which was their super power, they just didn’t have enough value proposition. I suspect they saw the desktop install base of Flash Player as too important to risk loosing by marking it redundant - innovator's dilemma. For some reason they just excepted defeat with Flash.
legofr 5y ago
I am happy to see Tencent-owned Miniclip die. Hope their mobile games will face similar fate, and that moral companies will take their place.
throwaway2048 5y ago
Here is a fantastic archive of old flash and other proprietary browser plugins games, short clips, and other content. https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/ https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/
andrepd 5y ago
For those of you who haven't heard of it, there is a project to archive and preserve all browser-based games and their respective runners. See https://github.com/FlashpointProject https://github.com/FlashpointProject
bertman 5y ago
Instead of mourning Adobe Flash, you could also head over to https://itch.io/games/html5 https://itch.io/games/html5 . Browser games aren't going anywhere.
zagrebian 5y ago
Web-based?
Sytten 5y ago
Ho this is sad. One of my favorite game was motherload (https://www.miniclip.com/games/motherload https://www.miniclip.com/games/motherload) before Minecraft was a thing. And this is what really got me into programming, I created a clone (https://github.com/Sytten/MineDeeper https://github.com/Sytten/MineDeeper) in C++ when I was in high school in 2012 (I even did fancy smart pointer stuff before it was cool). See https://www.developpez.net/forums/d1276790-2/applications/developpement-2d-3d-jeux/projets/minedeeper-jeu-creusage/#post7179598 https://www.developpez.net/forums/d1276790-2/applications/de... for a screenshot in desktop mode. I made friends on this French dev community that even became IRL friends and that I later visited when I visited France. So many memories, farewell!
- unholiness 5y ago
  In case you miss it that much, you can now get non-flash Motherload on Steam (Super Motherload includes both the sequel and a full clone of the original game): https://store.steampowered.com/app/269110/Super_Motherload/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/269110/Super_Motherload/
- kubi07 5y ago
  I love that game too! Such a great game, that little game even has a final boss! I sent miniclip a mail in 2012 asking for how to start programming and developing games and they replied! i still have that email in my inbox. At that time i was in highschool too but didn't start programming or anything related until university lol.
torginus 5y ago
I might be the weirdo, but I never fully bought into the mobile gaming market. It's very rare that I'm not close to a computer and I have the opportunity/inclination to play video games.
- cloudking 5y ago
  You're not a weirdo here on HN, most of us probably have desktop/laptop computers. However, for the majority of the global population, they only have a mobile device as their computer. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/
  - krajzeg 5y ago
    I checked your link because the claim seemed improbable to me. Here is what I found: - 77% US adults currently own a desktop/laptop computer (interestingly, this seems to hold mostly steady since 2008) - 85% US adults own smartphones There is no "only own a smartphone category" in the data. There is a "relies on their smartphone for internet access, with no broadband internet". This one is just 15% of adults, though slightly higher in the 18-29 age group. I can't see anything in that link that would support the majority of people using only a mobile device.
    - esrh 5y ago
      I think the link is bad evidence, but they mentioned the "global population," which makes the claim more reasonable.
    - cloudking 5y ago
      Wrong link my mistake, US has high usage of desktop/laptop but in most other parts of the world smartphone is primary device. https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mob...
MisterSandman 5y ago
This is really sad. Since everyone is doing it, here are some of my favorite games: 1. Snow Line (I still play this around Christmas every year) 2. Dream Racer 3. Bloxorz 4. Bubble Trouble EDIT: Also, did anyone else here use the avatar-builder that Miniclip had? Oh man, this is so sad.

182 points by tech234a 5y ago

Miniclip, Armorgames, Kongregate were my childhood. I guess this is the end of an era.

That's a shame. Ever since the removal of Flash from Chrome I think it's been a downhill ride for web-based games. I used to love going through the catalog of quirky "minigames" if you will every now and then to pass time. On top of the decline of Flash Player, I think mobile games definitely hit the nail in the coffin for them.

notRobot 5y ago
Yeah :( It's hard to find fun games that can be played in the browser nowadays. They definitely do exist, but there's no where near the variety that we used to have when Flash was still a thing.
- defenestration 5y ago
  I loved the days that Kongregate.com was thriving. Today, Armor Games is still up and running. It has quite some gems worth exploring: https://armorgames.com/games/rating#games https://armorgames.com/games/rating#games
  - Riverheart 5y ago
    Armor Games has been porting classics to Steam. We've got Scriptwelder games and Crush the Castle.
- Tijdreiziger 5y ago
  My go-to for these types of games is itch.io. https://itch.io/games/html5 https://itch.io/games/html5
  - smaudet 5y ago
    My experience with that is it usually never works, and for whatever reason the games never seem compelling. Not sure why, flash games never had that problem. They were always full games with rich graphics and often a story. I literally tried to pull up itch while tablet shopping yesterday - the site never rendered on the tablets and the one game I tried about crashed the whole tablet. Audio/video worked fine. I'm sure if I sat down at a high powered beefy windows desktop maybe they'd work - I remember flash working great on 1GHz celeron processors with maybe 1 or 2 GB of memory and windows 95. Html games are still a bunch of nonsense, on average.
    - Tijdreiziger 5y ago
      Some games can be iffy, but I haven't really had any major problems with the site. My computer is from 2015, so not exactly high-end. You could also install the desktop client, then you can play all the games easily (including the non-web-based ones). I'm partial to this one: https://leef6010.itch.io/projectkat https://leef6010.itch.io/projectkat
    - 29083011397778 5y ago
      I just pulled up "Farmers Stealing Tanks" on my BlackBerry KeyOne and played for a minute. It was playable (though not perfect), and that's on a 5 year old phone with a chipset that emphasized battery life over performance.
  - dleslie 5y ago
    Interestingly, it appears a great many of those are unity games and won't run on phones.
- jimbob45 5y ago
  Newgrounds is still alive and kicking. They’ve even ported all their Flash games to be playable on modern devices to boot! That said, I’m not going to pretend like I go there frequently either. I just don’t have time to blow on popcorn experiences anymore.
- unwind 5y ago
  I'm certainly not an expert but I think you're comparing apples and oranges a little. Js and canvas is a code execution environment, but Flash had a polished authoring environment which I believe made it easier for less-technical people to get stuff happening.
- andrepd 5y ago
  Unfortunately, it's hard to find fun games on mobile as well. Mobiles games are an utter disgrace nowadays. Can you even call them games? They're an optimised engagement loop with some gameplay in between the "buy platinum coins" and "spin to win" popups.
hackernewds 5y ago
Google decided to, and successfully, killed a whole software system. In hindsight, what was the reason, and was it justified?
- duskwuff 5y ago
  Let's be honest here: what killed Flash was years of neglect by Adobe. Google removing it from Chrome was a downstream effect, not a cause.
  - jterrys 5y ago
    Yeah, I'm old enough to remember how absolutely fucking garbage Flash was, and the source of many a web-based malware that haunted many a Windows user. I don't really blame Apple's decision not to support it. There's no way Jobs would've allowed such a disease prone plugin infesting his new platform.
    - smaudet 5y ago
      Are you sure it's any better? Last time I've used a JS heavy site the UX was just utterly awful. Flash had bad bits to be sure but it could be snappy. I had hope we could do better but a lot of sites seem as bad or worse on arguably better hardware. I'm not sure the tech stack was ever to blame...people would have eventually fixed the bad parts of flash.
      - duskwuff 5y ago
        > Last time I've used a JS heavy site the UX was just utterly awful. That's an issue with the web site, not the underlying technology. > […] people would have eventually fixed the bad parts of flash. The Flash plugin was a closed-source component. (Various attempts were made at open-source substitutes, but none ever reached a fully usable state.) The only people who could have "fixed the bad parts of Flash" were Adobe employees, and they didn't.
    - satellite2 5y ago
john567 5y ago
At this point in time. In what way was Flash superior to JavaScript and canvas? There was even SWF player implementations in JavaScript at this point in time. Somehow, I don't think the death of Flash had much to do with it. Rather, the app ecosystem replaced a space that, that for a limited time, was occupied by Flash based web stuff.
- naoqj 5y ago
  There's nothing as good and as easy as Flash was to create 2D games. It was wysiwyg. Even kids could do it.
- someotherperson 5y ago
  Is there authoring/creation tooling anywhere near what Flash had? I made Flash stuff when I was a lot younger and it was insanely straight forward thanks to the tooling. I haven’t tried to animate anything since… 2007 perhaps? Does JS or canvas have a similar experience to author content?
  - shoozza 5y ago
    Depends on what you need. For simple stuff Wrick Editor[0] might be good enough. [0] https://www.wickeditor.com/ https://www.wickeditor.com/
  - rchaud 5y ago
    Tumult Hype: a Mac application that uses a graphical timeline UI to manipulate CSS and JSS for animation, and includes a physics engine to simulate collisions, bounces and things needed for game design. Exports to HTML, GIF and MP4. https://tumult.com/hype/ https://tumult.com/hype/
- andybak 5y ago
  Authoring tools.
- cableshaft 5y ago
  Former Flash game developer here. A big part of it was artists and coders could use the same tool. An artist could create some flash animations and then I as a coder would go in and hook up all the code to make it functional without having to spend any extra effort to make the graphics or animation work (in other platforms you'd have to pack sprite sheets, color encoding, sometimes fight memory (at least I did on iPhone 4 back in the day), and then you'd have to set up all the animations manually and get each one working. With Flash I was just sent an FLA, browsed through all the animations, went "awesome", and started setting up hitboxes and dropping them into the game. Like I've wanted to port some of my Flash games to HTML5, but the intense frame by frame animation would be a bear to export and hook up in other formats. And non-frame-by-frame animation was easy enough that I could help fill in the gaps when needed, no big deal. I even made a few simple animations just for the hell of it back then since it was so easy to work with. I eventually migrated to console dev with XNA, then mobile dev with iOS, then some 3D development with Unity, and I've dabbled with Monogame, Phaser, Java, Pico-8, PlayDate, Unreal Engine, and currently working on a game in Unity again, since it's pretty much your only choice right now besides Unreal if you want good VR support. But yeah, nothing I've worked with has felt quite as nice as Flash as far as synergy between art and code, especially 2D art. Examples: I teamed up with an artist to make a 7 character head to head fighting game: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/187047 https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/187047 I teamed up with another artist to make a richly animated (espcially the boss) short platformer.: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/116067 https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/116067
giffarage 5y ago
If there was a demand, game developers would find a way. It’s just that kids are playing games on phones these days.
MivLives 5y ago
I think it was mostly mobile games. Why make games for small amounts of money when you can make actual money on the app store. The decline was happening even before Flash was removed from chrome.

lykr0n 5y ago

It's a shame that they can't transition it to a read-only archive type site, where everything is still accessible and playable- jut no new updates or content.

drBonkers 5y ago
What would it take to do something like this?
- andai 5y ago
  Literally nothing? Just leave it as is. There is a browser extension called Ruffle that lets you play older (AS2) Flash games, and eventually it will support newer (AS3) Flash games too. Edit: most users won't have the Ruffle extension, so the one great thing they could do is add it to the site with a single <script> tag :)
  - Otek 5y ago
    False. Bandwidth and hosting and keeping site working is not nothing.
    - hackernewds 5y ago
      As long as they're breakeven keep it running? I guess that also takes employees and not many are interested in just maintaining a website
      - antifa 5y ago
        I never heard of the site until now, how hard would it be to convert it to static?
        andai 5y ago
        Flash games are static content (except for high scores). A Flash game is just a SWF file, typically a couple MB (or KB!). If you'd like to experience the games that were available on Miniclip back in the day, your best bet is FlashPoint, a big offline archive of Flash games (ships with integrated FlashPlayer and a nice UI to search for games). https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/ https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/

cush 5y ago

Pouring one out for miniclip.com. For the countless hours of fun, covertly playing flash games in my high school computer lab when the teacher wasn't looking. Legend.

hackernewds 5y ago
Boom boom volleyball was the best
- susodapop 5y ago
  Even fifteen years on, I ocasionally remember the cheat code “GETEMOUT” for BBV.
andrepd 5y ago
Heli Attack 3 was dope. So were the nitrome games. And of course Club Penguin and Runescape.

PrayagS 5y ago

So long friend...

andai 5y ago

Is there an article or announcement here? On my phone it just takes me to their App Store page.

sincerely 5y ago
It's a banner on the desktop website. They link a FAQ that goes into more detail: https://support.miniclip.com/hc/en-us/articles/5091169897617 https://support.miniclip.com/hc/en-us/articles/5091169897617
- just-tom 5y ago
  This should have been the link, not the app store link that informs nothing.
  - tech234a 5y ago
    The link points to their homepage, though the site might behave differently on mobile.

gundamdoubleO 5y ago

So many creative and interesting games and animations were hosted on sites like this and Newgrounds. I spent so much time on these sites growing up that they shaped my interests, hobbies and gave me a sense of community. It's sad to see these parts of the internet slowly disappear and I'm glad Newgrounds is still able to harbor a niche community for now.

aniforprez 5y ago

Man, I'm so sad to hear this. Miniclip was the absolute best and I've had so much fun on the site going all the way back more than 14 years where I loved playing all those flash games. I remember having a ton of fun with some of the sidescrolling shoot-'em-ups that had a surprising degree of polish My favorite developers to come from that era was Nitrome[0]. They made so many classics like Skywire, Final Ninja and Cheese Dreams. They're still making games and have ported a large number of their Flash games to HTML5 to play on the browser. They're now making a Shovel Knight spinoff which was a pleasant surprise https://www.nitrome.com/ https://www.nitrome.com/

Max_Ehrlich 5y ago
Nitrome was the best! I especially loved their Steamlands game. You build these tanks to fight pirate tanks in a steampunk England. http://www.nitrome.com/games/steamlandsplayerpack/ http://www.nitrome.com/games/steamlandsplayerpack/

smittywerben 5y ago

Miniclip sucked. It was all about Addicting Games and XGenStudios. But the inferior Miniclip game selection (for normies) made me appreciate the other flash sites more. Miniclip was reliable though. It was a nice era. I feel bittersweet about this.

culi 5y ago
Kongregate was my main site. Every game had a chatbox so there was a lot of community building. And it was really built around creators as well, allowing any user to submit a game. As a result there was a ton of exclusive content there It's probably second only to Newgrounds in terms of driving a creator-centric vision of flash gaming/art Armor Games caught on to a little bit later
DavidPeiffer 5y ago
It's bringing back lots of memories looking through the XGenStudios catalog [1]. I remember playing Motherload when I was in middle school, around the time it was released (2005). It was a neat game, but was really difficult, with games lasting multiple days, a couple hours per day. I replayed it a couple years ago and was done in about 3 hours. I see they have Super Motherload, released in 2013. I may have to check it out. [1] http://www.xgenstudios.com/games/ http://www.xgenstudios.com/games/

Otek 5y ago

I will not, like others, cry over Miniclip because the truth is that I have looked there maybe twice in the last 5 years. But for sure I would also like to pay my respects and thank you for the time I could spend having fun there several years ago.

bbx 5y ago
I agree. A lot of comments here are in past tense: “Miniclip was…”, “the games were…”, “I loved…”, “they used to…” You can reminisce the good times but you can’t be sad they’re transitioning when their core audience (including me) haven’t visited the website in almost 10 years.

mkl95 5y ago

I loved Miniclip in the late 2000s. Their UX went downhill after that.

jterrys 5y ago

It's really a shame that Adobe's absolute garbage treatment of Flash ended up causing, in my opinion, roughly a decade and a half or so of young childrens' and teens' disinterest in making video games. That niche was somewhat filled partly by Roblox and Minecraft, and today it's getting easier and easier to spin something up in Unity, but there's never been anything quite comparable to the level of simplicity of just making some bullshit in Fireworks and fiddling around with Flash for a few hours while recording audio on a shitty microphone and splicing up old pictures to make a dumb joke. Ah nostalgia

wodenokoto 5y ago
On one hand, I kinda stand by being against flash, but on the other hand, we aren't really at a better place today than when Flash was all over the place.
- m12k 5y ago
  I just wish someone had made a good Flash/ActionScript3 -> JS+HTML-Canvas compiler. There's no reason we couldn't have kept the authoring tools just because we got rid of runtime and all its security issues.
  - samwillis 5y ago
    We now have Ruffle which does more or less what Adobe should have done 10 years ago. https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle If Adobe had seen their ban from the iPhone as a challenge to make Flash player capable of running without a plug-in they would dominate so many areas today. Flex would have become a viable platform to develop web apps/PWAs with - effectively sitting in the same position as what Flutter is doing today (Although I don’t believe Flutter is a one size fits all universal toolkit). I suppose they tried with PhoneGap but without Flash/Flex, which was their super power, they just didn’t have enough value proposition. I suspect they saw the desktop install base of Flash Player as too important to risk loosing by marking it redundant - innovator's dilemma. For some reason they just excepted defeat with Flash.

legofr 5y ago

I am happy to see Tencent-owned Miniclip die. Hope their mobile games will face similar fate, and that moral companies will take their place.

throwaway2048 5y ago

Here is a fantastic archive of old flash and other proprietary browser plugins games, short clips, and other content. https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/ https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/

andrepd 5y ago

For those of you who haven't heard of it, there is a project to archive and preserve all browser-based games and their respective runners. See https://github.com/FlashpointProject https://github.com/FlashpointProject

bertman 5y ago

Instead of mourning Adobe Flash, you could also head over to https://itch.io/games/html5 https://itch.io/games/html5 . Browser games aren't going anywhere.

zagrebian 5y ago

Web-based?

Sytten 5y ago

Ho this is sad. One of my favorite game was motherload (https://www.miniclip.com/games/motherload https://www.miniclip.com/games/motherload) before Minecraft was a thing. And this is what really got me into programming, I created a clone (https://github.com/Sytten/MineDeeper https://github.com/Sytten/MineDeeper) in C++ when I was in high school in 2012 (I even did fancy smart pointer stuff before it was cool). See https://www.developpez.net/forums/d1276790-2/applications/developpement-2d-3d-jeux/projets/minedeeper-jeu-creusage/#post7179598 https://www.developpez.net/forums/d1276790-2/applications/de... for a screenshot in desktop mode. I made friends on this French dev community that even became IRL friends and that I later visited when I visited France. So many memories, farewell!

unholiness 5y ago
In case you miss it that much, you can now get non-flash Motherload on Steam (Super Motherload includes both the sequel and a full clone of the original game): https://store.steampowered.com/app/269110/Super_Motherload/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/269110/Super_Motherload/
kubi07 5y ago
I love that game too! Such a great game, that little game even has a final boss! I sent miniclip a mail in 2012 asking for how to start programming and developing games and they replied! i still have that email in my inbox. At that time i was in highschool too but didn't start programming or anything related until university lol.

torginus 5y ago

I might be the weirdo, but I never fully bought into the mobile gaming market. It's very rare that I'm not close to a computer and I have the opportunity/inclination to play video games.

cloudking 5y ago
You're not a weirdo here on HN, most of us probably have desktop/laptop computers. However, for the majority of the global population, they only have a mobile device as their computer. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/
- krajzeg 5y ago
  I checked your link because the claim seemed improbable to me. Here is what I found: - 77% US adults currently own a desktop/laptop computer (interestingly, this seems to hold mostly steady since 2008) - 85% US adults own smartphones There is no "only own a smartphone category" in the data. There is a "relies on their smartphone for internet access, with no broadband internet". This one is just 15% of adults, though slightly higher in the 18-29 age group. I can't see anything in that link that would support the majority of people using only a mobile device.
  - esrh 5y ago
    I think the link is bad evidence, but they mentioned the "global population," which makes the claim more reasonable.
  - cloudking 5y ago
    Wrong link my mistake, US has high usage of desktop/laptop but in most other parts of the world smartphone is primary device. https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mob...

MisterSandman 5y ago

This is really sad. Since everyone is doing it, here are some of my favorite games: 1. Snow Line (I still play this around Christmas every year) 2. Dream Racer 3. Bloxorz 4. Bubble Trouble EDIT: Also, did anyone else here use the avatar-builder that Miniclip had? Oh man, this is so sad.