[Dead Game News] All Adobe Flash support ends in two years.

[Cloak_and_Dagger]

Adobe has announced that they will be dropping all support for Adobe Flash in two years.

 

Google has announced they will remove all Flash support from Chrome in 2020.

 

Mozilla has announced they will be disabling Flash by default by the end of the year.

 

Flash portals like NewGrounds, Kongregate and Armor Games have said nothing.

 

Flash dies in two years time. Desktop programs will not be sufficient; many games use external resources to keep bandwidth low (especially in the early days, so you could load a game and it could easily bring in assets without needing the time to load them). If Flash support dies and these sites with them, these games will be completely unplayable. This is 20 years worth of gaming history gone.

 

An article on the full situation, and what you can do to help.

[BTGBullseye]

Losing support isn't the same as killing the stuff using it. It's a difficult transition, but not necessarily bad in the long run.

[Cloak_and_Dagger]

Losing support isn't the same as killing the stuff using it. It's a difficult transition, but not necessarily bad in the long run.

 

Support isn't just ending from the Adobe side, it's ending from browser-side as well. This means these games will no longer run in a browser.

 

What this means is that flash portals like Newgrounds, Kongregate, etc. will be at risk of shutting down, and many of the games housed on those sites require external files also housed on their servers that don't come with a regular download, so these games cannot just be downloaded from the sites and run that way.

 

There's an example of this happening to a Spanish adventure game made in flash; when their main site went down, even people who had the game downloaded could no longer play it. There's also games like The Last Stand: Union City. If Armor Games goes down, there goes that.

 

There's no way of knowing which games will die until this happens without trawling through the code, and none of the sites have given any form of end-of-life plan.

[Icebox]

Sounds like another death knell for the old internet.

[BTGBullseye]

The Last Stand: Union City. If Armor Games goes down, there goes that.

That's a bad example because I have a 100% offline version of it floating around in one of my spare hard drives.

[BTGBullseye]

True that it's sad that they link it to online only, but there are lots of people preserving the at least semi-popular flash games... Many take requests too, just not for "this entire site".

[Cloak_and_Dagger]

The Last Stand: Union City. If Armor Games goes down, there goes that.

That's a bad example because I have a 100% offline version of it floating around in one of my spare hard drives.

 

See, that's just one example. In the article I've linked, there's a Spanish-language adventure game that can no longer be played, whether you have the .swf or not. It loads assets from a central server, as do many (these servers are usually housed on Kongregate, Newgrounds, Armor Games, etc.). If these sites go down, any game that used files housed there is just gone.

[BTGBullseye]

Most of those hacked games load assets from a server, the trick is finding someone who will save the assets when they load them. (as has happened for a large number of flash games in the past)

[Cloak_and_Dagger]

Most of those hacked games load assets from a server, the trick is finding someone who will save the assets when they load them. (as has happened for a large number of flash games in the past)

 

There's a project working to save as many as they can, but there are millions of these games. They need to find all these assets first, then hack the game to call on the assets from a different location. This would all be made a lot easier if the flash sites would make these assets public, but they haven't responded to this problem at all.