But your mom was on Windows, right? And probably running a pretty mainstream browser that was updated regularly.

If your only requirement is that you should be able to put your code on a website and your mom should be able to visit a link and run it, then the web is already significantly ahead of where Flash was.

Of course, the accessibility of creation is a problem, but if you send someone a link to a canvas-based animation, they are more likely to be able to play it today than they ever were in the days of Flash. They can even play it on mobile. Unless you're doing something very experimental, they'll likely be able to play it even if their computer/browser is out of date.

I mean, if we're simplifying this down to the common experience, the way people consume HTML games and Flash games is literally the same -- they visit a link. I have self-hosted remote playtests of the current game I'm working on by putting the game on a static page, and that is just as accessible to playtesters as anything that I was ever doing when I was building Flash games. More accessible, because now I don't have to send people to a wiki to get the game playing on Linux.

My mom was on windows, using an old version of IE. Never had any problems. Flash player compat wasn't perfect but it was more than enough to create vibrant scenes like Kongregate, Newgrounds, and ArmorGames. Anecdotal sure, but it was good enough for the scene to exist.

The main thing about the single-file thing is that it afforded the flash portal ecosystem. It was really easy to share your work as a creator without a lot of technical experience.

> but if you send someone a link to a canvas-based animation, they are more likely to be able to play it today than they ever were in the days of Flash. They can even play it on mobile.

Yeah but the problem is creating that canvas-based animation is insane, so there aren't any canvas-based animations, compared to the output of flash cartoons.

Nowadays everybody bakes out their animations to 100x the size with compression artifacts and stick them on Youtube with LESS features than flash had, a direct consequence of the decline of Flash and HTML5's inability as a platform stack to fill the gap.

I love Linux and the open web, I'm glad they exist and I want things to work on them. I just wish HTML5 as a platform had actually delivered on its promises by not missing the forest for the trees.

> Yeah but the problem is creating that canvas-based animation is insane, so there aren't any canvas-based animations, compared to the output of flash cartoons.

I think we might be arguing past each other.

I fully, 100% agree with this point. I just don't think it has anything to do with the web.

When people brought up replacing the Flash runtime with the web, there were two things being claimed:

A) that the platform itself could handle all of the technical requirements of Flash

and

B) that tools would exist that replaced Flash.

I believe that the first claim mostly came true, that the web today is about as powerful as Flash was. The second claim never even came close to happening. A lot of platforms exist that export to the web, but even the really popular ones like Unity just don't feel the same. Unity is, unfortunately, not an adequate substitute for Flash.

And I think that's a real tragedy, but I feel like we're at a point where the web should be left out of the conversation. There are game-related APIs that I want on the web, but for the most part there is nothing that browser makers can do to solve your problem.

Someone has to make a development environment. It's a separate problem. The web today is capable of doing the stuff you want it to do, but there is no development environment that replaces Flash.

And that's kind of revealing because it's not just that there isn't a web-compatible alternative to Flash, or there isn't an Open Source alternative. Proprietary game engines that aren't even targeting the web are not as good as Flash was for rapid content prototyping. Why can't anyone, commercial or Open Source, build a Flash replacement for any platform/runtime? That's the conversation we need to be having, not whether or not the web is mature enough as a runtime.

Yeah we've arrived at the same page here. I think we actually agree about most everything.

I do agree with everything you're saying about what's been lost, and I feel that loss because I went through that same loss. I'm not commenting from the sidelines, I lost Flash as a development platform too. I think my big frustration is that there's this tone that often comes up underneath threads like this that's, "look what the web took away from us", and I just think that's really harmful and inaccurate.

All of the APIs that are necessary to replicate Flash exist. The only failure of the Open web was assuming that the games industry was going to be competent enough to author new accessible tools. Heck, I was critical of Flash deprecation at the time, but even I thought that Adobe was eventually going to seamlessly export to HTML5. I don't know what to say beyond that. On behalf of HTML5 advocates everywhere, I'm sorry we thought Adobe might be a competently run company.

So I wish more of these kinds of threads were subtweeting people like Tim Sweeney, or Unity devs, or Adobe itself, rather than trying to blame the web for what is arguably one of its biggest success stories: the evolution from being only suitable for toy interactions into a generally accessible application runtime. The web succeeded at that, beyond almost everyone's expectations.

Almost everything that the web can provide to replace Flash it is providing. But web advocates can't build an IDE. Somebody in the games industry has to do that. So maybe those people should be the target of this ire instead of HTML5. I get why people are frustrated, but web advocates can't fix any of this. Somebody who builds game engines needs to fix it, the industry needs to actually make tools.

Like, to be kind of blunt, I wish people would stop criticizing the web for the problems that the games industry created.

There are two prongs to the problem.

Web standards evolve slowly and compatibility is often even slower. Developers still can’t target WebGL2 on iOS for example and only just got it for desktop Safari. We’re basically getting to the point where the web is a viable platform for games although there are still significant performance differences between browsers. No one’s going to seriously build tools for a platform that’s very slowly coming together. But the future is brighter there now just not in a realistic timeframe for a Flash replacement to be made.

The expertise to build Flash didn’t actually come from games. The next Flash might not either. It was also a long journey if you look at the development history of what became Flash. Building something at this scale takes a lot of time.

Then at the same time the market changed and a lot of the web game eyeballs became mobile game eyeballs. Hence a lack of industry interest in rekindling web support.

On the plus side I work for a web based game development platform and work pretty much exclusively in Chrome all day building games for the web. Our aim is somewhat different to Flash but we’re in the same ballpark in terms of wanting to make development intuitive and fun.

In the broader scheme of things I think the next couple of years are going to be really interesting for web games in general.

:) If you want to complain to Apple that they need to step up their game and actually support modern web APIs on Safari, I'm all for that, I'll be complaining right alongside you. I can even throw other APIs onto the pile, Safari is the only modern browser that doesn't support device vibration.

To be fair to the original thread, Apple has always tried to protray that it's doing something brave or prescient by dropping technologies or introducing proprietary standards, and it's pretty clear that they were not actually interested in the Open web when they dropped Flash. I do think Flash was dropped in a clumsy way, and I would try to separate Apple's clear push to try and monopolize the mobile games market and kill web games from the actual push for the Open web as an application platform.

I think Apple has made it pretty clear on iOS that they don't care about the web as an application platform.

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> In the broader scheme of things I think the next couple of years are going to be really interesting for web games in general.

I... hope so. What bothers me about the long-term future is that I'm now seeing less investment on the web side of things on APIs that I think are going to be essential to pushing web games forward in new ways. Even simple stuff like web audio, good controller layout support (also, controller rumble support please), better timing for fixed game intervals. I think the web could easily replace Flash, but there are definitely more APIs I want in general for games.

My worry is that it takes so long for the tooling in those areas to catch up that the actual APIs start to lag behind because there's not enough pressure on browser manufacturers to care about them. We already kind of saw this with Chrome breaking audio on tons of web games because they just didn't think to test them.

Best of luck to anything you're working on, I'm rooting for you.

The flash games of old have moved off the web. Just look at all the trash released on Steam every day (with maybe a few hidden gems). It's become the new Kongregate.

I definitely remember downloading SWFs and running them from my desktop. I don't recall having problems getting them to run. Just wanted to add that my experiences match up with what you're describing.