Adobe’s Announcement could mean the end of ourWorld, Animal Jam, Kongregate and many flash portals

Say goodbye to your favorite games.

[wpsm_dropcap]O[/wpsm_dropcap]n July 25th, 2017, Adobe Systems announced that it will phase out its Flash Player plug-in by the end of 2020.

Flash Players were once the most widely used plug-ins for watching videos and playing games online.  But due to security flaws in its code, flash always received criticism as a popular way to hacked infected computers.  Flash websites can’t be scanned or monitored by security services meaning a site admin could hide infectious code.

HTML5 technology, Flash’s replacement, offers many of the same functionalities.  One of the major benefits of HTML5 is it can be used for multimedia content and gaming without having to update a dedicated plug-in.  HTML5 offers better security features, as well.

Adobe systems said they will stay committed to support Flash up until the end of 2020 “as customers and partners put their migration plans into place”.

The demise of Flash

Apple criticized Flash quite often, especially in regards to support of iOS mobile devices. The late Steve Jobs once wrote a public letter about its shortcomings, highlighting concerns about its reliability, security and performance.

The Flash plug-in was never supported by Apple’s iOS mobile devices.

Adobe’s vice president of product development, Govind Balakrishnan, said the firm had chosen to end Flash because other technologies, such as HTML5, had “matured enough and are capable enough to provide viable alternatives to the Flash player.”

When Adobe acquired Flash in its 2005 purchase of Macromedia, the technology was on more than 98% of personal computers.  But on Chrome, now the most popular web browser, Flash’s usage has fallen off dramatically.  In 2014, Flash was used each day by 80% of desktop users, according to Google. The current figure is just 17%.

“This trend reveals that sites are migrating to open-web technologies, which are faster and more power-efficient than Flash,” Google added. “They’re also more secure.”

Google phased out full support for Flash software at the end of 2016.

What does this mean for games?

The death of flash could mean the end of your favorite games like Animal Jam, ourWorld, Kongregate, Armor Games, and so many others.  If these gaming sites plan on staying up, they will need to migrate their code to something that offers functionality.  Read our post about ourWorld and OpenFL/Haxe.

• Animal Jam announced July 2017 a new version of their game.  Animal Jam will remain open.
• Club Penguin closed their web portal due to the demise of Flash.
• ourWorld said they plan on migrating their game; but this has not been confirmed.
• Habbo has already migrated to their game to HTML5.
• RuneScape was the first game to migrate to HTML5 in 2013.  This was quite remarkable.
• Kongregate no longer accepts Flash game uploads and have been phasing out flash games on their site.
• Armor Games no longer accepts Flash game uploads and have phased out flash games on their site.

It should be noted that support for the Flash Player plug-in is discontinued in 2020.  People will still be able to download the Flash Player plug-in and play games with a high security risk.  People can use alternative-web browsers to access these games.  However, some games may no longer function properly.

Thank you all for reading news important to Donny Pie.
All good things must come to an end. Thank you Flash.

Credits: BBC News