Where did flash games go?

Beating tax out of peasants and burghers as the Black Knight listening to Clawfinger's Manic Depression on loop for hours... The memories...

Yellow alien

https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/
The Flash Games preservation project

The Flash Games preservation project is an attempt to preserve Flash games so that they remain available and playable.

flash preservation

The project is huge; the current full distribution of Flashpoint has a size of 31 Gigabytes. You can download a smaller collection with a size of just 2.2 Gigabytes if you prefer. The main difference between the two is that Infinity is configured to download Flash games that you select from Archive.org. The upside to this is that you won't have to download more than 30 Gigabytes of Flash files directly before you can start playing games.

The main downside is that it takes longer on first start to play games as they have to be downloaded first to the local system. Also, some games won't work with Infinity and are not displayed because of this.

The project maintains a Game Master List that is updated regularly. The current full version comes with more than 4000 games including many classic games. The developer has more than 2 Terabyte of Flash dumps on Google Drive from sites such as Gamepilot, JayIsGames, Newsgrounds, Kongregate, Armorgames, or NotDoppler.

Some Flash games can be saved to the local system and run from there without any issues provided that a browser or the standalone Adobe Flash projector is used for that. Others won't run because they rely on servers or have DRM baked into them which prevents local playback without modification.

The project uses the interface of LaunchBox and Apache web server capabilities to provide access to Flash games on Windows.

source:
https://www.ghacks.net/2018/08/28/the-flash-games-preservation-project-flashpoint/

I think it is probably because of Steam. Those flash games are simple project games that people just waste some free time checking out and probably wouldn't pay money for. The devs probably had fun making them as they learned to create games and also were possibly making a name for themselves so they might be able to make money in the future. Now we have a single place where everyone goes to find games, so that is where you want to put your game. The devs could still make simple games and release them on Steam for free, but why do that when there is a massive number of people that will pay real money for a game to increase numbers on their Steam account. The dev can just add cards and achievements to their game and all of a sudden people are willing to pay money, even if it is a horrible game.

I don't think the half way decent flash games of the past would bring any more money on Steam than a trash game with cards and achievements. Being able to make the same money from a completely trash game kind of deincentivises trying to make a half way decent game.

Also, I don't think many people sit on computers anymore playing simple flash games. If anyone today wanted to play those kind of simple games in their free time, it would be on a phone, so you would need to create an app for your game.

Apple didn't allow Flash, so Adobe killed it too... Blame them... Nothing gets done on mostly dead platform.

The answer is obvious, why make games on a dead, unsupported platform?

After all, why should you look specifically for flash games? There is still a ton of browser games made in HTML5, WebGL, etc.
For example, on itch.io 134 in-browser playable games were released... today.
Feel free to check them out yourself:
https://itch.io/games/platform-web

Also, it's sometimes a good idea to check out submissions for game jams (which also sometimes have a browser version). If the game jam is still running, you may be able to help the creator by writing a review/voting for it!
Or if you wanted, you could make your own game jam with (a prize if you want to attract more developers and) some good theme to make browser games for you to play!

Bump!

newgrounds has it's own player that runs flash games.

Yeah, I miss Feudalism too. Flash had finally lost the war but was great during its golden era.

Alien Hominid was so good it became a pretty well received game on multiple consoles!

Did you mean Alien Hominid?

iirc, the flash games are still exist in newsgrounds and kong. i can't say of the new ones though.

some people already archived their flash games on steam. the ones that i know are ninja kiwi (bloons), rusty lake (cube escape), and scriptwelder (don't escape, don't sleep). iirc, epic battle fantasy is going to be moved to steam as well after the dev removed some copyrighted content (some of the earlier games use parody from other titles iirc)

as for your question... i don't know the game name, i'm afraid. but i agree that people have been trying to put their games on steam nowadays, even their first game that was purely experimental... with a price tag. itch seems to have a better collection of free browser games, but i found the quality to be lacking. the ones that are playable in browsers are usually either those pico-8 or that other 8-bit engine that i forgot the name of that lasts for minutes. the others need to be downloaded to your computer, which is basically the same as steam games.

Some people are developing a flash interpreter, therefore you can play many games on archive.org

Good ol days, when stickman games was the sh*t. Don't know why I stopped playing them. Thanks for reminding me, will try some oldies.

Actually, Flash Players still work. It's just a matter of getting an older flash installer than 2019. The reason being is installed in the Flash Player installations come 2019 forward was a kill script that disabled and removed the Flash Installed files. You also have to make sure to remove the Flash kill script which is still on your PC or else, fwoop when you restart and start all over again. It's actually almost malicious.

Before attempting this, I recommend watching a Youtube video on how to do it step by step so you don't accidentally erase something else by accident. Note that this will make standalone projectors work, but not the actual browsers as moving to Chromium isn't something the flash players recognize well...

in play some games here https://archive.org/details/internetarcade but i don't know if they is flash or not
the adventure of robin hood is very beautiful

Anyone remember Zthing?