Submitted 1 year ago by moistclump@lemmy.world to [deleted]
In like, 2005-2010ish I remember there being these awesome online games through sites like Mini Clip. All disappeared from the internet.
I understood it had something to do with Java? Or… some plug in? I don’t really understand what either of those mean.
What happened to online games?
I’m going to go against the grain a little here and say you may have just grown out of it. A lot of kids have access to Chromebooks through their schools (at least in the States) and you better believe they know exactly where all the online games are.
And they got some really cool experiences we could never dream of. There are now several full games running in browsers, with 3d acceleration and everything. Play-cs or wipeout off the top of my head, but also a lot of older pc arcade and console games on archive.org and new originals on itch.io
RIP to the era of Flash. I hold that time dearly in my memory.
Here is a project that archived most of those games: flashpointarchive.org/downloads/
It’s great, you can save all your old favorites locally and have a single UI to run them
As mentioned, Flash was sunsetted for a lot of reasons
Unity and a few other game engines have “native” clients that can run in browsers and some promotional things have used them. Same with folk who go crazy with html5/js.
But mostly? There isn’t a need anymore. Because it is easier to just make a phone app
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
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.
They are still around, and much more advanced than the old flash games.
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
Soooo miniclip still exists, they’re just in the app store now
Flash died and the internet became a corporatized globohomo nightmare
The internet was already a nightmare already then and flash itself was at least a security nightmare.
The internet was already a nightmare already then
Not nearly as much as today, where a few sites control the majority of internet traffic.
flash itself was at least a security nightmare.
Agreed
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.
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?
slinkie@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I think you might be talking about Flash games. Here’s an article that summarizes Flash and what happened to it:
www.techspot.com/article/2413-adobe-flash/
moistclump@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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?
Lame_One@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
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
Ottomateeverything@lemmy.world 1 year ago
… 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. 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. 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?
sosodev@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Flash was a wholistic platform. You could draw, animate, script, play video, compile, etc within a single comprehensive edtior. 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.
originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 1 year ago
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.
sugarfree@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The demand shifted towards mobile games, which is also where the Flash developers went.
dbaner@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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