Actually Flash was fantastic (for games). AS3 is one of my favorite programming languages I've ever worked with, but Flash wasn't just a programming language. The display tree (put simply: game engine) was baked into the runtime, which made it very very easy to make games. The tight coupling between art (movieclips created in Flash the program) and code (AS3 written in FlashDevelop or notepad) made for very fast iteration compared to today's highly siloed environments (make art in W. animate in X. export with Y. hand off to developers working in Z).
The amount of hoops you have to jump through to run something interactive in Unity is mind-boggling by comparison (without even talking about sharing that thing with another human on another computer). Processing was also pretty good at the first bit, but it wasn't as tuned to games and sharing your stuff was pretty awful (java applets).
Just because I <3 Flash doesn't mean it didn't have security problems, though. I wish someone had bought the tech off of Adobe and turned it into a gaming platform a-la Steam with proper input support.
It might have been fun/easy to use for some people and encouraged game development that would have otherwise been too complex/too high of a learning curve. But browser games is a niche thing and really only a part of Flash's legacy.
Flash also got used for a lot of other things and in a lot of cases it was basically to add in functionality that wasn't supported by native web standards yet. This was why entire websites were built in flash. Because it gave you the freedom to do things that you just couldn't do with regular HTML/JS.
If the point the author wants to make is that creating games in HTML/JS is more cumbersome because there isn't one authoring tool that is used by everybody and has a comprehensive toolset, maybe that's true I don't know. But I definitely prefer this reality to a reality where Flash is still being used in 2020.
When you think about all the challenges the web faced early on, with all the attempted browser lock in and stuff like Flash, we got pretty lucky that things are fully open now.
And because HTML/JS are open and not proprietary, the people whining about it are free to take a shot at creating their own authoring software for games without having to worry about getting anybody's permission or getting sued by a company that owns the rights to JavaScript.
I will say, I think the niche of browser games played by kids is now taken up by phone games from a consumer perspective. I'm not sure even if an easy way to create them existed that they'd be nearly as popular.
> When you think about all the challenges the web faced early on, with all the attempted browser lock in and stuff like Flash, we got pretty lucky that things are fully open now
Where we are now is that the lock in is so wide that basically everyone is running Chrome, including its competitors.
It's a very different type of lock in. Chrome is based on the open source Chromium anyone can adapt ( sand said competitors, like Microsoft, do), and the vast majority of what it does is based on open standards. If tomorrow Google does something stupid with Chrome, like cutting off adblockers, you can bet your ass there are going to be at least 2 forks within a week. When Adobe did something stupid with Flash, you had and have zero options.
Nobody else can maintain a browser anymore, which is why almost everyone else dropped their own engine.
When google announced the "Manifest v3" thing, which does impact ad blockers, people cried, but nothing happened.
Yes, the standards are theoretically open, but concretely nobody else can keep up, Google-the-server launches X and Google-the-client implements it, and than they propose standardizing it but move on anyway, and everybody else plays catchup.
It's not worse than closed source Flash, but it's huge lock in anyway.
I will say, I think the niche of browser games played by kids is now taken up by phone games from a consumer perspective. I'm not sure even if an easy way to create them existed that they'd be nearly as popular.
That is for me the right way to frame it. Both flash and the web lost out to mobile. Neither managed to get a sufficient foothold there, and in practice people’s primary computing experience is now through fully proprietary apps distributed through vendor-controlled walled garden app stores.
The technical qualities of the underlying platforms didn’t matter all that much. Mobile platform vendors have control, and they made sure native apps made with their tools distributed through their store was the easier path. Apple could have improved safari’s progressive web apps ability to the point that it became a feasible alternative to making native iOS apps, but they didn’t, so people simply stopped trying to shoehorn web apps onto mobile platforms.
Apple didn’t kill flash to replace it with html5, they killed it to replace it with their own proprietary tech. I’m not sure they intended it that way, but they definitely intend to keep it that way (witness for example how web notifications are in safari on desktop but not mobile).
I said much the same in another comment -- my kids (5 & 8) play a bunch of browser games, but eventually they'll have their own phones and steam accounts (and credit cards) and stop playing free stuff in the browser.
One could argue we have more games today and they are more richly animated and more complex than it ever was and they have better reach to more number of users (with iOS / Android) than ever before.
So from a user's standpoint, things have become better not worse – they don't have to compromise security or accept horrible battery life in doing so.
From the developer's standpoint, things have improved too – they don't have to depend on niche toolchains and they have better monetization options today than ever before. For small game studios it is easier to find mainstream developers who can do game development rather than only those willing to master niche toolchains.
The side-effect of using mainstream toolchains is it has more moving parts and hence has more complexity (that is unnecessary at a solo developer scale).
I agree that the learning curve has become harder a creative arts designer who wants to be a solo game developer to express their creativity.
So maybe the real question is what are the accessible mediums in which creative digital artists put out their hobby/amateur work today?
I would argue that html5 game toolchains today are FAR more niche than Flash was in its prime--I'm not even sure I'd know how to write that job description. Keep in mind that Flash wasn't just solo indie devs--I used it personally on teams of up to 25-30 people for Facebook games and knew people working on much larger teams.
Battery life wasn't really a thing I worried about before smartphones came along, so I'm not sure that's super relevant (although, if you want to pick that fight, Unity on mobile is a real battery killer). Security was rough, but I think I'd trade a bit of security to ditch the walled gardens we have today.
I do think things are better in most ways for users. Because Flash portals didn't require a download, it was MUCH easier to try new things. This led to a virtuous cycle of people making weird shit. Because so much game content is gated behind app stores these days, you have to download a thing and then wade through permission/notification screens and it's too much of a cognitive burden compared to "oh, that looks neat." (Toss on that app stores are horrible for discovery). I think the way most people discover (mobile) games these days is through ads, and if a game is running ads they're a large company with plans to extract $5-$10+ out of you...
So we've traded big catalogues of free games with crappy banner ads for walled gardens that depend on ads for discovery of exploitative IAP skinner boxes.
Flag games were not for people who want complex games. It is like arguing by seven series long Game of Thrones when people complain about lack of short story fanfic community.
I miss flash games and scene that existed around it. Including free aspect of it and ease of development of it. I do not care about complex games game studios put out.
AS2 conformed partially to ECMAScript 4 and I believe AS3 was a superset of ECMAScript 4. They had a lot of features that current developers complain about vanilla JS even today such as compile-time and run-time type-checking. Flash/AS had its creative uses, I wrote a client library for a SAAS medical records applications for doctors that worked around some of the limitations on filesizes for multipart forms in 2012 that allowed me to chunk the upload of multi-megapixel webcam images so doctors could take pictures and attach them to patient records. A fun chance to solve a vexing problem, at least at that time.
The amount of hoops you have to jump through to run something interactive in Unity is mind-boggling by comparison (without even talking about sharing that thing with another human on another computer). Processing was also pretty good at the first bit, but it wasn't as tuned to games and sharing your stuff was pretty awful (java applets).
Just because I <3 Flash doesn't mean it didn't have security problems, though. I wish someone had bought the tech off of Adobe and turned it into a gaming platform a-la Steam with proper input support.