End of Flash Era: A Death For Your Flash Game or Reincarnation?
Aug
28
28
The media have made a fuss around the Adobe’s recent announcement of their final decision to stop updating and distributing Flash Player by the end of 2020. The company encouraged all content creators to migrate from Flash to open web standards, as this is the only way to keep pace with current trends of web browsers that are capable to fully replace plugins.
Most visioneers (Steve Jobs among them) predicted the end of Flash life was coming soon, and lots of people just couldn’t wait to see it happening. Still, a mass of Flash content was created over the years for the question to pop up: will it all be lost for good, same as manuscripts written in a dead language?
One of the biggest concerns is about the future of games based on Flash. Adobe team took maximum care of the issue and collaborated with major technology partners, including Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Mozilla, for creating the easiest possible path for migration to HTML5 and WebGl.
Some proactive minds of the games industry already took this path long before the announcement of Flash death. There are already over 200 HTML5 titles on Facebook, including King and Plarium games and, according to Facebook, the migration to a new web standard barely had any impact on the existing playerbase. So, if you already have or plan to bring your game(s) to Facebook, you need to consider one of the following options: HTML5, WebGL or Gameroom (known for supporting the native formats).
If you are a game developer - or a human being using web - you might want to save the dates and major stages of Flash support removal.
There will probably be no tears as Apple disables Flash in its software for a number of reasons: iOS devices never supported it, for Mac it ceased to be pre-installed back in 2010 and Safari browser already requires approval to run Flash plugin. Today, Google Chrome works in a similar way but next summer it will switch to click-to-run for Flash (the feature is already active in Microsoft Edge on Windows 10). For a very detailed calendar you can visit the Microsoft blog, you’ll find a step-by-step action plan for separating Microsoft Edge and IE users from using Flash. Mozilla is joining up in August to start saying goodbye to Flash plugin and request users to choose sites where it’s allowed to run (by the way, all other plugins have been disabled since March).
What is it so bad about Flash - a technology that’s been used far and wide to create games, animations, videos, banner ads? It was left on its own and didn’t evolve into a technology that can be competitive with modern web standards. Crashing, endless batches of updates, multiple security issues and high CPU usage have led to Internet swarming with haters (we even came across a website promoting global Flash uninstallment).
But naturally, there are Flash advocates, some of them even published a petition requesting Adobe to open-source Flash player and Shockwave spec in order to preserve “an important piece of Internet history” for future generations.
It’s very unlikely that Adobe accedes to this request, yet even having an open-source Flash will become pointless at the end of 2020 when the whole web world says goodbye to Flash.
Make sure your games will not follow Flash to sink into oblivion - give them a new lease of life!