I saw somewhere "As a frontend developer, I cannot be happier that the Flash is going to die. As a person raised on Newgrounds, there are tears of nostalgia." Speaking of Flash, I miss the most this game... or rather, meme-focused experience (IMHO it is a true masterpiece): "Reimagine :The Game:" by Nicky Case: ( https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/569281 , video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG1gh5l1YLM ). Two…
Well I never played these games before, what I miss the most is exactly that. A plethora of games that had no monetary reason to make them. Simply because it was possible for a solo non-skilled person to put a inspired idea in Flash in a relatively quick amount of time. I don't think we have any equivalent in the web today
There's some of that on itch.io, there's just also plenty of paid stuff there too.
The trajectory of Flash has been one of the great disappointments of the 21st century. Initially it democratized animation and gaming for a whole generation... Then Adobe bought it and moved it higher and higher up the shelf out of reach of young artists through cost and anti-piracy measures. At the same time, its nimble little plug-in became worse and worse, becoming synonymous with security problems and endless pat…
The demise of Flash only deserves half the blame. There are a lot of brilliant animators out there, but YouTube has become the discoverability channel of record, and it penalizes content that doesn’t release rapidly and often. Flash could have been open source this whole time, and still the next Homestar Runner never would have beaten the ease with which Pewdiepie can churn out low-effort content.
Rapid and often is a little irrelavent in my opinion. YouTube provided a degree of centralization that has allowed certain kinds of creatives to flourish but it could never recreate the old flash games and cartoons for the simple reason that centralization enables easy censorship and progressive/tolerance culture is 100% censorship culture these days. Tons of flash games were violent satire, YouTube knee jerk banned gun related content. Lots of flashes were anti-pc teen humor, YouTube is aggressively pro lgbt. The old flash sites were less practical for tolerance tyrants to take down because they were too small and quickly replaced to be worth the effort, but YouTube is now the only real game in town for content creators with ambition and Google has no interest in anything besides pandering. The modern platform environment simply doesn't facilitate the kind of free creativity that existed before.