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?
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
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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
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
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.
Most game jam games on Itch.io run in a browser. You can filter for web 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
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.
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
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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.
I think you might be talking about Flash games. Here’s an article that summarizes Flash and what happened to it:
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.
They are still around, and much more advanced than the old flash 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.
Kongregate was dope, it was like Steam but for flash
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.
