Who? Who celebrated?
Who celebrated? Everyone at the time who wasn’t trying to write flash exploits did
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.
I was a flash dev back then. People were very happy because of no more plugin need, no more badly scripted flash-ads that ate 100% cpu, etc.
Also Apple…
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.
I tried to become a flash developer back then 😞
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.
What’s Plant’s vs Zombies doing there? That was a post-iPhone game
That was a flash game if I remember correctly. It was just ported to everything
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.
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
It’s just hard to find the good games now since there are so many
That said, indie games are way better these days
They all seem to be the same boring stardew valley/dead cells/anyotherauccessfullindiegame clones with pretty pixelart and too much time e commitment needed
As if flash games weren’t 75% dressup games, tower defense, and shit platformers. We still got plenty of that slop don’t worry, we just have other kinds of slop to go with it.
I remember a horrible tower defence with dinos and ugly towers, maps and really strange upgrade designs. Rated one star on some old flash games website.
However absolute masterpieces like fancy pants man are forever good.
The game you are talking about is Age of War and is arguably one of the most well known and beloved flash games ever. It might just not have clicked with you but I have very fond memories of it and find it to be more enjoyable than most recent releases as you could just launch a game, play a bit and be done with it, no toxic mechanics, no forced wait, no super extensive (and kinda boring) content.
There are lots of other games as well. Let me recommend a couple:
- What remains of Edith Finch
- A short hike
- Outer Wilds
- Disco Elysium
- Feather
- Gris
- Journey of the broken circle
- Sayonara Wild Hearts
- Untitled Goose Game
- a dark room
Your “couple” is a whole extended polycule
Disco Elysium by itself is an extended polycule.
The polycule is a state of mind
They definitely skew to the pixel games and the rogue-likes, due to the limitations of a cell phone interface. But Idk if I’d call stardew valley boring.
I had a lot of fun with Slay the Spire and Balatro. There’s a bunch of indie board games that are on mobile as well, Root being one of my favorites. And then there’s all the digital CCGs (basically the only way I play MtG anymore is on mobile).
I would say the bigger problem with finding good indie games is the nightmarish volume of bad games (both indie and otherwise) that crowd out everything in the marketplace. I learn about the ones I like through word of mouth. Anything I just randomly install and fool around with, I inevitably hate.
Idk if I’d call stardew valley boring.
Oh stardew wasn’t (ok, the start of year one, maybe)
finding good indie games is the nightmarish volume of bad games (both indie and otherwise)
Yeah, that seems to be the issue. It became so easy to make games (and now even more with vibe-coding) that the market is flooded, often with clones.
There was a lot of lazy copies with flash games too. And that’s not unique for indie games or even video games. Every form of media has people copying what’s already successful
Some of the best games are copies of earlier games that flopped, because they were poorly implemented or lacked good marketing or were just ahead of their time.
Yeah there’s a lot of copycats, though even within that there’s some great stuff. My wife has been loving fields of mistria. But also I’m currently playing slay the spire 2 and loving it. You’ve got games like cult of the lamb, Rogue Legacy (1&2), every supergiant game, Cassette Beasts, and less well known ones like Song of the Deep. Flash games were their own thing and it was awesome, but with limited time for games these days I’d rather be playing modern indie games. But I understand why some people would feel the opposite
the time commitement bit is real.
:: looks around nervously as someone who loves those specific games::
I was working as a flash developer when they killed it. I was definitely not on board haha. I had to pivot my whole career but I learned such a valuable lesson.
Flash was the tool that really made programming click for me. It was easy to pick up but hard to master and I spent so much time learning how to write all kinds of code patterns
I don’t know if people working at Artix are passionate, but I definitely wouldn’t call their games ‘free with no microtransactions’.
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.
If I remember correctly flash was never cheap, everyone just bootlegged it.
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.
People who have no clue what they’re talking about be like:
I mean, seriously… Celebrating FLASH of all things? And complaining that there are no more free amateur games? MF, never heard of Unity? Godot? O3DE? Defold? GDevelop? OGRE? renpy? pygame? stride?
The worst of these still being infinitely better than Flash. And then you can publish your work at Itch.io.
I think they are just celebrating the era. The Internet was completely different then. A lot of those flash games later turned into microtransation shit as well on new engines.
Yeah, it’s just unsubstantiated “looking back through rose tinted glasses” kind of thing.
Only the ones that had enough staying power to be turned into microtransaction shit on new engines. Remember how many horrendously grotesque and edgy games there were for no point other than to be horrendously grotesque and edgy? Sure we have some of those now but scrolling Steam or Itch it isn’t a constant stream of edgelord suicide simulators or whatnot
itch is full of low quality generic slop made by restrictive game engines. A few good games. A few.
So exactly the same as flash games?
I hear you, but not quite - Flash games had more of a blank canvas and there was no obvious way how you would build your game, leading much greater and richer variety.
Itch stuff is far more formulaic
Nonsense.
You have RPG games, rogue-likes, VNs, puzzles - literally all the kinds of games in existence are right there on Itch. It’s exactly like back when Flash was popular, only this time it’s more secure and less resource hungry (most of the time).
Hmm on second glance you might be right. Still, I find it hard to find any good web games, there doesn’t seem to be a rating system (perhaps for good?)
Any standout games you can recommend?
My general approach is to find any gamejam (if you just browse the free games lists many will happen to be from gamejams and link to whatever gamejam they’re from) and look through the games that resulted from it. Gamejam games tend to be high quality short experiences
A couple that I’ve enjoyed recently:
- Dragon Tax Return Simulator 2015
- Peggys Post
- My Dystopian Robot Girlfriend (optionally NSFW)
Top rated free games: https://itch.io/games/top-rated/free.
I personally don’t play on Itch that much, but I just had a looksie today and found something that seems to be the spiritual child of Trackmania: https://kodub.itch.io/polytrack.
This is also brilliant: https://edgarmendoza.itch.io/help-no-brake
so like Gamemaker and Unity??
i also seen alot of Godot which is not restrictive.
Web Assembly will always be better then Flash(the Engines you mentioned turns the code into Web Assembly)
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.
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.
This is the best explanation of Flash I’ve ever read!
Metaphor game on point.
