We absolutely didn't celebrate its downfall. Flash had issues, but the culture of flash games was awesome.
That said, indie games are way better these days
We absolutely didn't celebrate its downfall. Flash had issues, but the culture of flash games was awesome.
That said, indie games are way better these days
You can still do this. There're loads of free and basic (i.e. easy-to-learn) game engines and you can make games of much better quality with the same effort. itch.io is full of free games made by amateurs.
When people celebrate the downfall of Flash, it's not because of the games. It's because the entire internet was replete with unnecessary Flash-heavy bullshit that required constantly updating your browser's Flash plugins (and all browsers had their own version you had to install and update), and how it was completely unsuited to any sort of UI/UX (e.g. you couldn't even copy and paste text in Flash pages most of the time). And all that is to say nothing of the gaping goatse of a security hole that it was.
It was cancer. Just because the cancer got you down to your goal weight, it doesn't mean you should lament the success of your chemotherapy.
To be fair, flash was garbage proprietary tech fully under control of fucking Adobe. All the shit people hate about JavaScript now, the spying, the adtech, was done in flash first.
Iirc, wasn’t flash deprecated because of unpatchable bugs that created a gaping hole in your browser security?
Ironically I believe flash mostly died for that as a founding moment on why apple would not support it on iPhones. Adobe only finally killed it after safari decided it wouldn’t support it
maybe that too, but mainly it was the move from desktops to smartphones and tablets, which Flash was (at minimum) not very suited for if it was supported at all
This may be the only good thing caused by the existence of iOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash
There’s plenty of criticisms to be made against Apple, iOS, etc, but “the only good thing” is a super generic and reductive statement. Proper sandboxing, app review by humans for people just hitting “install” the A chips leading to the M chips which are forcing competition, are all good things, and there’s more. Apple is overpriced, molds the market, fights against being a monopoly, takes advantage of international supply chains and people, that’s where they deserve the most criticism rather than their engineering specifically which has caused a bunch of really good tech things, not perfect, and not binary
All the shit people hate about JavaScript now, the spying, the adtech, was done in flash first.
And the shitty slow overly complicated 'web app' pages that could've presented the same content in a hundred lines of HTML. That was done in Flash before it was done in JavaScript.
To be fair, flash filled a gaping hole in html and css standards for a hot minute. Heck for the longest time flash was the best way to serve a video player because of those limitations. It also was instrumental in enabling animated videos on the Internet in a time when video on the web was too bandwidth intensive to be viable. We're talking the days of Internet connections measured in individual megabit per second being "fast" and dialup not being uncommon
Y'all had megabit connections?
I had dial up. Load a page and walk away and do something else for a bit. 56 kbit/s was theoretical max. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dial-up_Internet_access
Well, it used to be a brilliant innovation by Macromedia.
We celebrated the downfall of Flash because every other week, some horrible vulnerability was found. And because of the ease of distribution in games, it was super easy to jack people's computers.
What killed the prevalence of all these wonderful free games was developers' ability to make money on Steam and Roblox.
Plus those of us on Linux desktops didn't love the workarounds we had to do with gnash or whatever. The rise of the mobile device cemented the need to have open web standards not tied to proprietary formats and proprietary software.
A bunch of the original flash games just got straight ported to Steam (or the various Apple/Google Play stores).
You can buy them for a few bucks and play them to your heart's desire. Or find pirated copies and sideload them.
was developers’ ability to make money on Steam and Roblox.
And Valve/Apple/Google getting a 30% kickback.
They are absolutely fine with all the garbage because it buys them many, many megayachts. Newgrounds, Kongregate, Addictivegames and all those flash websites did not get megayachts.
was developers’ ability to make money on Steam and Roblox.
The amateur game dev community is thriving like never before. Itch.io has become Newgrounds on steroids, full of incredibly creative, fun and free games.
People like to complain about what has been lost on the modern internet, without spending any time actually looking and trying out the new niches.
How are you finding decent free games on itch? Every time I go it's a flood of visual novels, shit "horror" games, or whatever the latest streamer bait is but poorly copied 1000 times. And the filtering tools are just limited enough that I can't seem to get a good "feed" going.
Newgrounds was far from a neverending fountain of pure quality, but I feel like finding quality stuff on it is an order of magnitude harder than it used to be in the days of flash. Used to be curated lists and sites with new quality stuff like every week.
I engage in the community - just like the good old newgrounds days. There was also tons of unplayable, eyecatchy stuff back then, we just dont remember it as much.
The most effektive way is to participate in game jams, get to know people and find out who makes the quality stuff. Pretty much exactly like finding good new podcasts or youtubers. It takes some effort but it is totally worth it.
Add to the end of the url ?exclude=tg.visual-novels
That should get rid of the ones that are properly labeled. Sadly only works with one tag but definitely helps.
Browse by genre and you won't see any visual novels unless you want to
Who the fuck celebrated? I remembered many pissed off millennials and Gen x
I did, flash was a pile of garbage especially on anything not windows
Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash
I'm not a fan of Steve Jobs but here he was just laying down facts
Once Adobe got their grubby hands on it, everything went down hill but Macromedia at least did security updates.
The people mistakenly claiming html5 was going to be the next Flash, I guess
It... Is? Check out itch.io and there's still.shitloads of browser games around.
Also some of them are high quality porn games. This is both a warning and an advertisement depending on ones temperament.
I remember a lot of dating sims.
One of them started with a guy in a bathroom shaving and playing techno music before going to find a date.
They had funny as heck endings like the girl spinning on the ceiling fan at the end (During sex). Just crazy stuff.
Anyone remember what they were called? I swear I had them archived but I can’t find them anywhere. I think there were 20-30 of them from the same creator.
Well ok, I guess it eventually got there, but at the time Flash was getting shut down there wasn't any equivalent self contained game engine IDE that compared, it was a big setback.
Flashpoint Archive is attempting to archive all the flash games and animations.
To those asking "who celebrated"...Linux was not always well supported by Flash. The promise of HTML5, with first class Linux support, was very appealing.
https://shallowsky.com/blog/linux/flash-installer-confusion.html
I only celebrated the downfall of flash because it was an insecure piece of shit software. It just happened to have people make a ton of fun and interesting content on it.
Yeah, this post is celebrating Flash like it enabled creativity when jt was just the popular framework. That era didn't die because Flash went away. Companies killed that era and propped up parts of its body to trick people.
While yes it is, but I was responding specifically to the 'celebrating its downfall' part, which we should have because flash was insecure as fuck.
As I noted, there were a ton of fun and interesting items people made for it, and you can even still find them out on the net to relive those days and even see new shit on places like newgrounds. But let's not pretend that flash itself didn't need to die well before it did.
It wasn't about the technology, it was the zeitgeist of that era. If HTML 5 was available at the time, people would code in that
Who? Who celebrated?
However, consider: if Flash was still popular, by this point Adobe would have enshittified it to hell and back to milk its customers. It would no longer be the thing you miss.
Thry would probably jack up the license fee for devs, force everyone to use a shitty app store and when enough users are on the app store, start charging to use the app store.
Funny that Club Penguin made it into the picture. It's one of the earliest games I can remember that pushed subscriptions and micro transactions and was aimed heavily at young children.
yeah it was fine to play games on or see neat websites but it was absolute garbage to build and maintain with.
fresh out of college one of my first jobs was a web master for an ad agency whose site was purely built in flash/actionscript. It was the absolute worst to update. I hated it. I was one of those that celebrated flash and actionscripts downfall.
I completely forgot about this trend of building actual websites in flash. Fuck disabled people right?
yeah it was "all the rage" in the early 00's up to like the early 10's. Pain in the ass to build, even worse to maintain and update. but EVERYONE wanted a cool interactive flash site. It's just trends with companies. I remember after flash it was all paralax. everyone wanted paralax. thankfully that was a lot easier to build since it was just HTML5. but yeah web dev trends are annoying because you're constantly having to learn new stacks that you know will become irrelevant in like 3 years or less once some middle manager discovers something "cool".
I'm all about using Astro + Tailwind because it reminds me of building Geocities sites and I like that.
Flash was so good, I'm sad it's gone. The HTML5 era has been a massive let down.
Nothing except for the use of Flash has changed... There are still tons of free to play games without MTX or other greedy bullshit made by passionate people, and just like back in the day, 90% of them are straight doodoo.
FFS, Newgrounds is still around and gets new stuff posted daily. Anon should leave 4chan and check out the rest of the internet.
Robot unicorn attack is a masterpiece.
The issue is anon's peers on 4chan called itch dot io "full of indieslop", now anon cannot get themself to check what it has, because the games don't feature slurs and racial stereotypes, for "comedic" purposes.
Who celebrated?
I did, it was a horrible medium littered with security issues and most of them were hot garbage in the first place.
The best fun was being asked to modify the menu on a website only to find the "webmaster" who built the site used Flash for that, and having to figure out how to reverse engineer it.
It was way past time for it to die when it was finally forced off the Internet... One of the few things I thank Apple for doing
Everyone who liked free and open source software and open standards and such things, which Flash was very much the antithesis of.
I honestly miss those flash games. Like I'd spend hours upon hours scrolling through websites like bored.com playing all kinds of games. I could play any game in any genre and have a great time.
I miss those times. Maybe I miss them because they remind me of my youth but they were amazing either way.
Gen X misses Flash, too. My Geocities page featured a beat maker with samples you could trigger to make cool drum and bass with.
Adobe went from "You should implement your entire website in flash, see how modern and unique you can make it!" to "We're terminating flash in a year"
To be fair, Macromedia had peak Flash and Dreamweaver for "Website dreams can come true!" era. When Adobe acquired them, they started ruining it and leveraging legacy. Yes, the tech improved as would be expected over time, but the passion was gone. Adobe killed Flash but had already taken its soul years earlier.
People don't realise many of their favourite Flash games were from 2005 or earlier—the larger parts of the golden era. They were Macromedia games then.
People don't even talk about Shockwave any more. Early 3D games in the fucking browser! It was amazing.
Yeah. I remember as a teen, my father said I should look at learning Shockwave as a potential career pathway after school. It was taking the web by storm and many people were convinced that Macromedia's visions was the future of the web.
I still kind of remember Macromedia Lingo. I had taught myself HTML—which was an extremely easy thing to learn for a child back in that day—and I started learning Director, JS, and Shockwave.
By the time I was older and out of school, Adobe had aquired Macromedia. But in a few short years during that time, websites had gone from basic HTML, images, frames, etc. to entirely animated opening scenes vectoring together beautifully over the top interfaces. UX was out the window because everyone's brain was happy to explode at how cool an interface functioned...once it finally loaded lol. We used to visit websites to show friends how cool they were, still amazed at a cool "loading site" Shockwave animation, happily sitting there waiting, because we knew soon sprites would follow the cursor around lol
I remember being told at school not to learn HTML because flash is what websites are going to be made in now.
There's still games, and the old ones aren't dead because the people in middle and high school are still playing them at school, just using flash emulators or html5 versions. People play run 3,slope, Henry stickmin, old version of 1v1 lol without micro transactions, etc.
I don't remember a single person being happy with Flash going away
Flash had a ton of vulnerabilities. It felt like one zero-day RCE per year.
Flash never had a good FOSS implementation until years after Flash Player was discontinued.
I was very happy about the death of Flash Player, but neutral on the death of the Flash format.
I didn't celebrate per se, but Flash was incredibly insecure and HTML5 was good enough for most of these simple games and it came out in... 2008, so 13 years before Flash went EOL.
What I did celebrate was finding out that Ruffle is a thing and most of your old favourite Flash games websites use it now so you can play your old favourites again! It's also open source and written in Rust so everything necessary to give the programmer nerd in me a boner.
It never died though? The Devs just pivoted to different platforms. Itch, Newgrounds, and even the major app stores have endless content from indie devs.
Flash games were just never mainstream enough. And let's not forget that the most popular flash games were those shitty FB games, like FarmVille and Candy Crush, or that the shitty mobile games all started off as clones/ports of already popular flash games, like Angry Birds/Crush the Castle.
I heard somewhere that Flash itself is garbage (not the games in it)
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