I think you might be talking about Flash games. Here’s an article that summarizes Flash and what happened to it:
this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Interesting. So, I gather that what happened was iPhones and changes to coding languages (HTML5) which didn’t require an extra on the system (a plug in) to do it’s thing.
But then… Why didn’t the games transition with it then? Why didn’t people rewrite that style of game to play with the new technology?
A good chunk of games DID change with it. The Unity engine makes it very simple to design games for Web. But it's also easy to make those simple games for mobile instead, which has fewer restrictions abd is more prolific. In fact, a good chunk of the bigger flash game companies migrated to mobile. There's just little demand for a web game when I can create a mobile one, monetize it more easily, and reach a larger audience by making it for mobile instead
Lots of animators and indie creators making games today honed their skills as teens programming in Flash as well. Now that the platform is not around kids just jump straight into Unity, or any of the other purpose made apps to animate and make games. Like GameMaker, RPGmaker, Krita, Blender, etc. There's just a more varied plethora of options than back then. Which means the things they create are more spread out in social media outlets than centralized under a single webpage.
So, I gather that what happened was iPhones and changes to coding languages (HTML5) which didn’t require an extra on the system (a plug in) to do it’s thing.
... Sort of. That's a bit of an oversimplification and iPhone-centric, but generally the right idea.
I'd slightly shift this and say it's more that flash and Java had many known problems and were janky solutions to the limits of HTML of the day. They were continued to be supported by browsers because they were needed for certain tasks beyond games that were actually important. Games were just a secondary thing that were allowed to exist because the tech was there for other problems.
At the time, more "serious" games were mostly local installs outside your browser, and browser games were more "casual" and for the less technically inclined general audience. The main exception here was Runescape, and a couple others like Wizard 101 etc.
But then smartphones started becoming more popular, and they just could not run flash/Java effectively. They were inefficient from a performance standpoint, and smartphones were very behind in performance and it just didn't work well. In the early days, many Android phones would run bits of flash/Java, sometimes requiring custom browsers, but it just wasn't very performant.
Then HTML5 came along, solved most of the gaps in existing HTML tech, and the need for flash and Java greatly decreased. Because of the performance problems and security vulnerabilities, the industry as a whole basically gave up on them. There was no need beyond supporting games, as the functional shortcomings were covered, and HTML5 did somewhat support the same game tech, but it would take massive rewrites to get back there and there was basically no tooling. Adobe had spent over a decade building different Flash tools and people were being dumped to lower level tech with zero years of tooling development. Then came WebGL and some other tech... But nothing really made a good grip on the market.
Unity and some other projects allowed easier compilation to HTML5 and WebGL over the years, so this was definitely still possible but simultaneously the interest was plummeting so there wasn't much point.
Much of the popularity of web based games back in their day was you could just tell someone a URL and they could go play it on their home computer. Their allure was their accessibility, not the tech. The desire for high tech games was won over by standalone desktop games. But those were harder to find, required going to a store, making a purchase, bringing a CD home, installing said game, having the hardware to run it, etc.
But at the time of the death of Flash and Java, everyone carried a smartphone. They all had app stores and could just search the app store once, install the game, and have it easily accessible on their device, running at native performance. Console gaming had become commonplace. PC gaming was fairly common, with pre-built gaming PCs being a thing. Now Steam existed and you didn't have to go to a store or understand install processes. Every competing tech to web games was way more accessible. Smartphone tech better covered "gaming for the general populace".
What would be the point of a web game at that point? Fewer people have desktops so your market is smaller. If you're aiming for people's smartphones, doing stuff natively to two platforms is higher performance and easier to deal with. Console gaming is more common. PC gaming is a stable market. OK top of that, there's way less money in web based gaming. Stores like steam and console game stores have the expectation of spending money and an easy way to do so. Smartphones have native IAP support to make it easy to spend money on microtransactions. Web has.... Enter your payment information into that websites payment processor they have to integrate, which feels less safe to the user and requires more work from the developer than the alternatives on console/pc/mobile.
There's just no market for web based gaming anymore when people have so many more options available that are easy to access - what's the purpose of building a web based game at that point?
I'm going to be honest I didn't read most of this but people do make browser games and they are very advanced. I work IT in a school and play the games I ban for a few minutes for uh, research, and I've basically played CS 1.6 in browser. I just played 1v1 fortnite clone where you could build. Check this open world need for speed knock off, even has mobile support: https://www.crazygames.com/game/crazy-for-speed
Nothing I wrote claimed they don't exist, but they're much less common place than they used to be. My post was explaining why that is, as asked by the OP.
Yes, tech has grown and there's more possibility, but there's just a far far smaller market if them than there l used to be.
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Flash was a wholistic platform. You could draw, animate, script, play video, compile, etc within a single comprehensive editor. HTML5 + JS was only the low level technology. There was no tooling supplied when the transition happened.
There have been some attempts to recreate the Flash ecosystem since then but they haven’t picked up steam.
Also, there was not any system for porting your existing stuff over to the new tech. Adobe abandoned Flash so you were left to figure it out on your own. These days Flash games can actually be emulated using the modern technology so porting is fairly feasible. But again people have already moved on.
The demand shifted towards mobile games, which is also where the Flash developers went.
Most of the successful games moved to Mobile. In particular Miniclip is almost exclusively a mobile games company now and still makes games like 8 ball pool
people didnt want to spend an inordinate amount of time rewriting their entire application/game from scratch. the return on supporting an insecure, proprietary platform like Flash wasnt there.
Here is a project that archived most of those games: https://flashpointarchive.org/downloads/
It's great, you can save all your old favorites locally and have a single UI to run them
RIP to the era of Flash. I hold that time dearly in my memory.
The market reason is mobile games sucked up all the developers that would make flash games.
Kids aren't sitting at desktops all day anymore, so you make your game for ipad instead
And fill the game with IAPs.
Exactly. The money is crazy for mobile games if it pops off. Where as flash games are really hard to monetize.
Web games are basically only hobby projects these days.
Adobe killed Flash. All of those games were Flash. It takes a lot more work to code them as pure JavaScript, and I guess nobody felt like doing it.
Except neopets
Newgrounds still lives and flourishes, to this day it is still an incredibly active hub for free browser games and animations. Itch.io is another hub that is very active, both with free and paid games. Both have thousands of browser games, quality ranging from literal shit to truly excellent.
Flash may have died, but the browser game very much lives on.
this guy happened^
I remember hacking my itouch and installing Cydia, then downloading a hack that added flash support. I felt amazing being able to play flash games at school
It has nothing to do with Jobs. Adobe killed the technology that all of those games ran on.
You mean Flash? That iOS refused to support?
Oh that's right! I completely forgot about that. To be fair, they said they wouldn't support it because of all the security holes, and then Adobe killed it a few years later. But yeah, Apple shunning it probably did contribute to its death. My bad!
exactly what I was getting at 😉 Steve Jobs had a hard on for html5
Soooo miniclip still exists, they're just in the app store now
They are still around, and much more advanced than the old flash games.
Also, individual games can still be found online: https://dan-ball.jp/en
Seems the developer has rewritten his Java/Flash games into HTML5.
what i miss is kongregate. i got into it later than i should have and now it is pretty much completely dead. they dont even have chat rooms anymore
I know someone else linked it already, but you should really check out Flashpoint
Just want to add, if you're feeling nostalgic about some of these Flash games and want to play them again, download Y8 browser. My personal favorites are Warlords: Call to Arms, and Steppenwolf: The X-Creatures project.
Like others said, most web games made in 2000s up to mid 2010s were flash based. When adobe killed flash web game makers either had to re-write the game completely in html5+javascript or leave them to die. Flashpoint is an extremely comprehensive archive of almost every known flash game + an emulator to play them.
Cool math games.
Is facebook not full of them? When I used facebook in the early days of facebook games, there were lot's of flash games that later transitioned to HTML5. Games like Farmtown got copied and monetised (e.g. Farmville).
I think the company was Zynga that copied new indie facebook games (I seem to recall drama) and monetised them.
Does that ecosystem still exist?
Yes, but Social Media games have always had MUCH lower quality than online/standalone games.
I don't know what flash games you were playing but I can't remember any that I'd describe as quality. The ones I were playing were mostly user uploaded ones made with pirated versions of flash dev tools (I was known to make my own for a while too - this may have ifluenced what I was exposed to).
The most polished games I can think of outside of facebook pre-HTML5 were those ones where you drag the clothes off the woman and it's a photo of her naked underneath. I seem to recall settings for changing breasts too.
What quality flash games are you thinking of?
Umm, Kongregate and Armor games used to produce famous games. I liked platformer games like Amberial or FancyPants Adventure, also Bloons TowerDefense or I Love/Hate Traffic. Rebuild was one of great ones (strategy survival after zombie apocalypse), etc. There were talented guys out there.
Hmm, I think those games came out a bit later than when I was playing flash games.
I also think many of the facebook games were more polished, but on thinking about it there were not a lot of genre options. Most facebook games were quite similar to each other in terms of time passing in real life being a core part of most facebook games. Flash games were a much wider variety of genres.
Kongregate was dope, it was like Steam but for flash
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