In like, 2005-2010ish I remember there being these awesome online games through sites like Mini Clip. All disappeared from the internet.
I understood it had something to do with Java? Or… some plug in? I don’t really understand what either of those mean.
What happened to online games?
I think you might be talking about Flash games. Here’s an article that summarizes Flash and what happened to it:
I’m going to go against the grain a little here and say you may have just grown out of it. A lot of kids have access to Chromebooks through their schools (at least in the States) and you better believe they know exactly where all the online games are.
And they got some really cool experiences we could never dream of. There are now several full games running in browsers, with 3d acceleration and everything. Play-cs or wipeout off the top of my head, but also a lot of older pc arcade and console games on archive.org and new originals on itch.io
RIP to the era of Flash. I hold that time dearly in my memory.
Adobe killed Flash. All of those games were Flash. It takes a lot more work to code them as pure JavaScript, and I guess nobody felt like doing it.
Except neopets
The market reason is mobile games sucked up all the developers that would make flash games.
Kids aren’t sitting at desktops all day anymore, so you make your game for ipad instead
And fill the game with IAPs.
Exactly. The money is crazy for mobile games if it pops off. Where as flash games are really hard to monetize.
Web games are basically only hobby projects these days.
Here is a project that archived most of those games: https://flashpointarchive.org/downloads/
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It’s great, you can save all your old favorites locally and have a single UI to run them
Newgrounds still lives and flourishes, to this day it is still an incredibly active hub for free browser games and animations. Itch.io is another hub that is very active, both with free and paid games. Both have thousands of browser games, quality ranging from literal shit to truly excellent.
Flash may have died, but the browser game very much lives on.
this guy happened^
I remember hacking my itouch and installing Cydia, then downloading a hack that added flash support. I felt amazing being able to play flash games at school
It has nothing to do with Jobs. Adobe killed the technology that all of those games ran on.
You mean Flash? That iOS refused to support?
Oh that’s right! I completely forgot about that. To be fair, they said they wouldn’t support it because of all the security holes, and then Adobe killed it a few years later. But yeah, Apple shunning it probably did contribute to its death. My bad!
exactly what I was getting at :-) Steve Jobs had a hard on for html5
Soooo miniclip still exists, they’re just in the app store now
Most game jam games on Itch.io run in a browser. You can filter for web games
They are still around, and much more advanced than the old flash games.
Also, individual games can still be found online: https://dan-ball.jp/en
Seems the developer has rewritten his Java/Flash games into HTML5.
what i miss is kongregate. i got into it later than i should have and now it is pretty much completely dead. they dont even have chat rooms anymore
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The internet was a nightmare already then and flash itself was at least a security nightmare.
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I didn’t say that the Internet nightmare of a decade ago is the same as the internet nightmare of today. It just got progressively worse.
I know someone else linked it already, but you should really check out Flashpoint
