We celebrated the downfall of Flash because every other week, some horrible vulnerability was found. And because of the ease of distribution in games, it was super easy to jack people’s computers.
What killed the prevalence of all these wonderful free games was developers’ ability to make money on Steam and Roblox.
Plus those of us on Linux desktops didn’t love the workarounds we had to do with gnash or whatever. The rise of the mobile device cemented the need to have open web standards not tied to proprietary formats and proprietary software.
A bunch of the original flash games just got straight ported to Steam (or the various Apple/Google Play stores).
You can buy them for a few bucks and play them to your heart’s desire. Or find pirated copies and sideload them.
was developers’ ability to make money on Steam and Roblox.
And Valve/Apple/Google getting a 30% kickback.
They are absolutely fine with all the garbage because it buys them many, many megayachts. Newgrounds, Kongregate, Addictivegames and all those flash websites did not get megayachts.
was developers’ ability to make money on Steam and Roblox.
I only celebrated the downfall of flash because it was an insecure piece of shit software. It just happened to have people make a ton of fun and interesting content on it.
Yeah, this post is celebrating Flash like it enabled creativity when jt was just the popular framework. That era didn’t die because Flash went away. Companies killed that era and propped up parts of its body to trick people.
While yes it is, but I was responding specifically to the ‘celebrating its downfall’ part, which we should have because flash was insecure as fuck.
As I noted, there were a ton of fun and interesting items people made for it, and you can even still find them out on the net to relive those days and even see new shit on places like newgrounds. But let’s not pretend that flash itself didn’t need to die well before it did.
Flash was so good, I’m sad it’s gone. The HTML5 era has been a massive let down.
“Hey guys, hear me out… what if we take all these great tools and replace them with… nothing?”
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I don’t know anyone who celebrated except maybe the shitstains at adobe who planted the timebomb in Flash Player. Though that was pretty short lived because people found a way around it, either out or necessity (in china) or because they wanted to keep using the Flash projector to play games on Desktop.
For anyone not aware of the workarounds it was likely pretty shitty for people who needed or want to use software that depends on Flash Player.
Of course now we have ruffle.rs but it still isn’t perfect, and there is still software that relies on unimplemented functions. Hopefully those get resolved soon.
There is a Flash-animated webcomic I read years ago that really excelled in the medium. Thank goodness for Ruffle, or it would be lost forever.
All the web developers I know did a little jig that day. YMMV
There’s still games, and the old ones aren’t dead because the people in middle and high school are still playing them at school, just using flash emulators or html5 versions. People play run 3,slope, Henry stickmin, old version of 1v1 lol without micro transactions, etc.
That is absolutely true 💯
Who? Who celebrated?
Who celebrated? Everyone at the time who wasn’t trying to write flash exploits did
Everyone who had a laptop getting more than 20 mins life out of the battery, because flash would turn the CPU and fan up to 100. Of course there where also a lot of ads using flash on each website…
They got the corporate greed hit the exact same way as cellphone games. Pushed graphics and bloat too hard the, medium couldn’t handle it any more.
I don’t remember a single person being happy with Flash going away
Flash had a ton of vulnerabilities. It felt like one zero-day RCE per year.
Flash never had a good FOSS implementation until years after Flash Player was discontinued.
I was very happy about the death of Flash Player, but neutral on the death of the Flash format.
I didn’t celebrate per se, but Flash was incredibly insecure and HTML5 was good enough for most of these simple games and it came out in… 2008, so 13 years before Flash went EOL.
What I did celebrate was finding out that Ruffle is a thing and most of your old favourite Flash games websites use it now so you can play your old favourites again! It’s also open source and written in Rust so everything necessary to give the programmer nerd in me a boner.
I was a flash dev back then. People were very happy because of no more plugin need, no more badly scripted flash-ads that ate 100% cpu, etc.
Also Apple…
I was happy.
Funny that Club Penguin made it into the picture. It’s one of the earliest games I can remember that pushed subscriptions and micro transactions and was aimed heavily at young children.
Also, Adventure Quest had a subscription (not necessarily micro transactions) and the image for Bloons TD is, as far as I understand, from modern Bloons with micro transactions.
Nothing has really changed on this front. Nothing is stopping you from making and playing flash games, and flash itself is just as vulnerable now as when it was still supported. The only thing that’s really different is that dropping support seemed like a good excuse to massively shift culture away from it all.
I hate shit like this. Fym we celebrated it’s downfall?? Excuse you?? I was not happy about it.
Relevant: Newgrounds Flash Forward Jam 2025
Edit: oops that was last year. Flash Forward 2026
TAKE ME BACK 😭
I tried to become a flash developer back then 😞
I was working as a flash developer when they killed it. I was definitely not on board haha. I had to pivot my whole career but I learned such a valuable lesson.
Flash was the tool that really made programming click for me. It was easy to pick up but hard to master and I spent so much time learning how to write all kinds of code patterns
i never celebrated this nor has seen someone do, wtf
