When did Flash die and Unity take over?

I used to work for a company making Flash adver-games for companies' websites. Maybe around 2012.

Of course the writing was on the wall as Flash was being phased out. And the company wasn't quick enough to embrace mobile and Unity development. (I think the market in aver-games was also just phasing out too. I'm not sure.)

I'm not overly proud of working at these places doing things like advertising sugary cereals to kids. Not that I would think very many people would be playing those Flash games on their websites.

Of course a lot of these small media companies have since gone bust.

It was an interesting time where companies were throwing money at these digial media firms.

Were any of you guys a part of this era? Did most of these companies survive until now, maybe morphing into mobile platforming companies? What would the equivalent sort of companies be doing today?

 

I think the big browser vendors pretty much have done the most they can to make it real difficult to put these types of apps / plugins in the web browser and unity doesn't fair any better. Issue being a lack of control and possible vulnerability holes.

Personally, I kinda agree.

 

Perhaps maybe google Stadia, where it seems everything is offloaded to the server, but no small company could meet that kinda requirement. I don't think there is a similar thing. . . Maybe with HTML5 and webGL but even that is difficult to get working consistently on all platforms and web brwosers.

 

I think the demand for these kind of advertisements has been dying out, since websites which include lots of CPU heavy ads themselves have been dying.

 

OC there is https://webdesigner.withgoogle.com/

Which does the simple things flash ads used to do. But yh for heavy game like ads? Pretty much not much demand I would have thought.

 

Flash died the moment Apple elected not to support it on iPhones. Which was about 2007. Since then its been a slow descent into oblivion. Its taking a long time to die. But even Adobe has finally given up on the tech, with support ending in 2020.

 

The real final nail in the coffin was when browser vendors also went "...you know... let's just... not support plugins. They are nothing but trouble."

 

That said... surely if they wanted to Flash could also have developed support for building to WebGL? Which would also have solved a part of the problem with lacking iOS reach.

 

That would have been a good, made a few games with Flash and it was fun, as a tool for making animations, cartoon graphics and games, even websites. I think Unity with project tiny and some better tooling in vector drawing areas etc could bring back that 2D cartoon animation stuff, or 3D to the web in a faster way with a much better editor than flash could have ever been.

Shame webgl hasn't progressed fast enough to have been a direct replacement for the Unity webplayer..only now finally sort of getting there I suppose.

 

People are trying, but getting actionscrpt to work has been a bit of a process. Currently mostly just animation is supported.

 

Rise of HTML5 also helped killing flash.

 

It's hard for me to make a more "ehhh kinda" hand gesture. It was a bit of a factor, but HTML5 is still really not super well used in spaces where Flash used to occupy. If smartphones never saw the massive shift that came with the iPhone's introduction and then the big Android changes, maybe though. Smartphones kinda devastated Facebook as a gaming platform, which drew a lot of advancements away from things like HTML5 in favour of mobile app development.

HTML5 was more like a kid running up and kicking the dead body.

 

@Murgilod valid points.

Besides HTML5 games and web design on its own, there is ads and videos space, which plays big part in my opinion, using HTML5. Previously lot of vids was played via flash, or websites packed with flash ads, which were killing websites to halt.

Anyone remember websites with multiple flash ads animations, which cause browsing websites experience below poor? Now try play games with these flashing flash ads on every corner of the web page.

 

Well, on that front, online advertising also changed a lot thanks to mobile phones. The way ads are delivered changed, but also the way ads are targeted, and the bandwidth they had to occupy. Again, that's... more phones than anything else.

 

Case in point, BackYard Monsters on FaceBook was still showing Ads. Clash of Clans copied it, but as an App, gaining the power to easily connect to your credit card.

I think the easily downloadable Apps were the real Flash-killers. armourgames.com used to be the place to go. Now I'll have an App I play and notice "whoa -- this is also on a browser? Like, for the Amish?"

 

For animation I using flare https://www.2dimensions.com/ which operates on flutter (for my app i'm dev'ing.) Works on android and ios at least.

 

I would say that html5 is the real replacement for flash. Unity is used for stuff like web games when the player actively chooses to start the player

 

As far as income from my flash games is concerned, it really only died a few months ago when Chrome finally dumped the player. (well, income went down about 2/3rs at that point) Residuals were still surprisingly strong until then.

 

How were you making money from Flash games?

Oh. You know what. I bet YouTube was a real Flash killer too. (Even though YouTube used to use Flash for it's player).

I mean why make flash animations when you can just upload any animation you like to YouTube. And a lot of advertising I bet has gone to "influencers" on YouTube. And instead of making "adver-games" I bet most companies just get YouTubers, Twitterati, and Instamodels to promote their products.

You remember that Salad Fingers guy (Boomers)? He does his animations on YouTube now.


Guys... that means we're in the wrong business! We should all become Instamodels and Instabros™. It's the logical next step.

 

I assume Flash games on web pages make money the same as any other web page -- Ad revenue. Ads on the internet were a thing from at least 2000. Getting people to spend money was the problem. Compare to mobile, where Ads are only a few years old (like how easy it is now to add Unity Ads), but you could have in-game spending since it started.

You may be joking, but that U-Tube thing isn't that far off. Eyeballs are eyeballs. Back in the day, the only decent content on the Internet, which you could spend hours on, was games. Now the people who were playing games are watching someone else play them on U-Tube, watching the same Ads. But by that logic, Unity would be dead, too.

 

I mean, Unity3D web kind of died too after Unity4.x. RIP Webplayer. I miss that thing. For years all we've had is an AOT single-threaded WebGL target that doesn't support TCP/Sockets. With Webplayer's death we lost neat Unity3D web tiles like Uberstrike, an online FPS by Cmune.

It's a shame really. Flash died but Unity didn't really take over because the WebGL target for Unity is pretty poor compared to the old Webplayer extension.

It doesn't really matter though in the end since Mobile applications took over, especially for games. I don't think kids are rushing to their local library or school library to load up AddictingGames.com or Runescape anymore. It's all mobile apps.

 

For me it was perhaps 70% ads and 30% licensing deals.
I was huge. I think it peaked about 5 years ago. If our games didn't do 50 million plays we considered them flops! Per-game the revenue was small, but it added up to maybe half a million dollars a year at that point. We made a lot of games though.
The death of flash came in many ways. Ad blockers and link stoppers were the worst culprits. But now of course you can't even play Flash games in a browser without jumping through hoops.

 

Hate to break it to you, but this actually means that the worst culprit was actually the fact that trying to use the internet safely without these things. Adblock and link/popup blockers only ever gained popularity because of that.

 

I miss things about flash because it was a very simple way to develop interactive or just animated web content. Try doing drop shadows and blurs in Unity on your UI!
Apple, security, battery-load were it's downfall though Apple are now doing the same thing with webgl (Mac Safari warns you on heavy memory/cpu content) so it seems Apple just want apps to be the future and the web to be a lightweight battery-safe browsing zone!?

Html5 has not turned into the dream replacement.

Unity lacks the same accessibility, coming from it's 3D/GPU-bound roots, though it does so much more.
Perhaps Project Tiny and some wrappers around common functionality could easily be made into something similarly light and accessible?

 

Thanks for breaking that to me.