The Flash Games Postmortem

[Music] it's it's really an honor to be able to talk about Flash games today um to be here at GDC um I was just thinking about uh coming in today how 15 years ago I was trying to pay for college I was struggling trying to make rent and that we had a community we had developers we had sponsors we had a group of individuals who not only let me eat but also eventually pay for college and pay down my debt and just pretty much survive and um this is the flash games postmortem this is a a talk about um the Indie Spirit about an industry that Rose from the most chaotic place to make games and then um the fall of sponsorships and the fall of uh technology and what happened next um so

my name is John Cooney I work at congregate um and I'm just going to get right into it um so we've always looked at flash games as these kind of lunchtime time wasters these distractions these um things that we um kind of take for granted but but in reality flash games and developers we really formed the foundation of the modern indie game scene um we built really incredible things and we saw that many games and developers uh were born out of flash um we had game sorry we had games like Super Meat Boy uh evil land coming out of game jams um alien hominid haunt the house Ridiculous Fishing all these games had their foundations in Flash and building content quickly and easily to the web um as flash developers we Blaze new trails we defined what it meant to be Indie and we pursued really Innovative content and this kind of content that directly enabled the

greater industry to move forward in pretty colossal ways so when we when we're talking about the flash games postmortem this is the story of the Prototype Indie this is the story of this ubiquity this insane technology this impact on our industry that's uh was really unlike anything else out there my name is John Cooney I'm I've been a flash game developer for 15 years um I've developed over 100 flash games and I've produced 20 to 30 more um worked on games like achievement unlocked uh this is the only level Hedgehog launch um I was the creator of my own studio in college which helped help me eat and and pay for bills um uh during that time I also worked on flash rights which was a resource for helping developers find um ways to figure out how to protect their work and to learn about fair use um talk about copyright um I moved over to armor games and was head of game development there um worked on about 70 titles while I was there and then I'm now at congregate working on our premium games initiative in our

Launchpad program which is our incubator for experimental games um really quick housekeeping I we we're covering about 19 to20 years in an hour so I'm going to go really really fast there's about 150 slides so I'm just I'm going to go non-stop I'm going to put the slides online because I think it's really important for you guys to go back and take a look at the the games and just kind of everything that's been written um we're also going to post it to the congregant developers blog so you can get it there after this presentation um I also really want to clarify that this talk isn't to talk about why is dead and to make arguments um we could spend hours doing that this is really to have a conversation and to talk about um the amazing things that came out of the flash games community and to really reflect on the last 19 to 20 years so okay let's go uh in 1998 uh we saw the birth of Flash and it was because the internet was really slow and it was really young and um back in 1998 we were using America online and dialup and um this was really like the normal thing to do was to have a dialup modem and hope

your mom didn't pick up the phone so that you lost your connection um we were downloading illegal MP3s um but they took 10 minutes to do because it was they were so big um and we didn't really have Broadband at the time Broadband was not really what we were having in our homes um just for cultural context this is the year that Titanic won the best picture as well just to kind of show you how far back this was and this is when flash came onto the scene um it was 1998 and Flash came into ERS and said we're going to have this lightweight and Powerful plugin so that people can create animations and interactive work and we're going to make it really lightweight Because the Internet is so slow um and it could do that because it leveraged Vector Technology it really found ways to really push a lot of data and information uh through uh instead of sending bit Maps or large image files instead wrote the instructions for how the compiler should actually recompile the information back into the plugin so

um instead of sending 60 frames of Animation which was really heavy at the time um it would just send the first frame and the last frame and and use math to interpolate where that should be uh to give more information on that um we can take a look at these two photos and say oh these are kind of the same photos but in reality The Flash Vector that was being sent was just a just a quarter of a kilobyte it was Tiny for the time and this technology was really cool um flash came in two parts there's Flash the program which you use to make your content and there Flash Player the free plugin that you use to uh display that content flash content required the download of the browser plug-in but luckily this was the late '90s and in the late '90s you could get anyone to download anything so it was it was we had a browser plugins we had Bonsai buddy it was a great time for the internet cuz um and what that resulted in uh along with that compelling content that animation uh that was really clean crisp 30 frames per for second is we got

ubiquity we got a plug-in that could be played pretty much anywhere uh by 2009 99% of computers connected to the internet had flash installed but flash was still young it was an animation tool we didn't really view it as a games tool and but game developers are smart and we saw that they were creating quizzes point-and-click Adventures these sort of really barebones almost early hypercard sort of games and putting them up on the web and in 2000 we saw action script arrive and this is when we really got our hands dirty with programming uh it was very easy to use if you're already a programmer it was very accessible if you never wrode cat in your life like I did um I could figure out how to make really bad games with really very little amount of code and what we started to realize is that we were stumbling upon the holy gr game development this was a tool that was easy to script it was easy to draw you could deploy immediately there was a huge audience that was really excited about this content and it was accessible

everyone could pull up a browser whether they were at the local library their school their home computer there was a way to get to this content and this was really a cross-platform dream and this was in the '90s and the 2000s the early 2000s and this was cool we exported once and it worked everywhere and we didn't even test it half the time and it just magically worked everywhere it was awesome and that brings us to the first really important cultural part of flash games which is new grounds and in 2000 Tom Fulp released the automated flash games portal which allowed you to immediately upload and View and engage with content immediately this was immediate uh the moment you hit upload you saw spinning bar and it uh instantly was on the site running uh this was before YouTube in fact this was 5 years before YouTube this was in a time where screens were pretty static this is really uh early on the edge of what we call Web 2.0 or The Intern interactive web and it really opened up the idea of

instant communities being able to communicate with our users but also communicate with other developers uh to get feedback on our games for people to get engaged with our content uh there was scores and reviews and rankings and forums and there was artists and this massive Community which was really incredibly important to flash starting um new grounds began to see a swell in this Flash game content as uh developers uh programmers animators musici were coming together to work on really small projects and to be creative together and one of the things we saw was the emergence of the collab and uh or which is short for collaboration which was really just setting up like this onetime project together and working on it and seeing how it goes um and it was really cool because we could continue to work with other developers that we had never worked with and to get to know a bunch of people inside our community and work together and this may sound s familiar because this is really what the

Prototype Indie is this was really developers creating what they wanted self-publishing gathering this massive audience making fans uh finding their own unique voice in games and then delivering it on their own um so as developers we built a lot of games and we worked with a lot of people and we especially worked on small ones and in fact um 75% of games uh and or sorry of developers we're working on games that were less than 2 to 3 months in duration um and a quarter of that were're in than a one month cycle um the question I always get is why are flash games so small um there's several reasons uh the first one is that the file size had to stay small we were still in a restricted bandwidth uh time for the internet um flash took forever to compile really large files and one of my favorite stories is I had to run to school to compile a file cuz my computer was under uh performing in compiling so every time I had to go compile the game I had to ride my bike to school and hit compile and then run home to be able to

upload it um uh we also saw that long Flash game development was getting outpaced there was a lot of games coming out the art was evolving the technology was evolving everything was evolving really quick and if you're working on really long games we weren't they were getting outpaced by the progress of flash games at the time and we weren't making any money we were just doing this for fun this was just our sending things out and seeing how it goes and and really enjoying the process of it just making games um so we started asking ourselves how are we going to get paid to do this how can we make this our living because this is really A rad process and the first place we started was webpage ads uh we found out really quickly that you could go on Google AdSense and and go download the code and put it on your page and and magically you're now earning money on your games and ads of the time were really good uh we were getting $2 to $10 for every thousand page Impressions so if you had a viral title it was really doing well for you um so we just put a couple

banner ads around the game put it up and but we saw this other correlation we realized that when we were making good games we were getting a good amount of traffic and when we're getting good traffic we're getting those ad views and those ad views were giving us more income so there's this direct correlation that the better the games were the more Innovative the more interesting the more stand out the content we were basically making more income and we were getting paid for it um that was really cool um other people who weren't making games also figured this out uh website owners around uh the internet were discovering that these flash games are getting a lot of traffic they're getting a lot of Revenue so they started collecting this content into places called game portals and uh very similar to Newgrounds there were either long lists or large uh places with tons of icons and they got this content in a lot of different ways um the first thing they did was uh ask a team to build it uh if they had a specific idea for a game they would pay that team to build it uh they would license it they would find the game already existing and then pay to have a version of that game directly for their site uh they asked

for it they said hey um your game's really good would you mind bringing it over to our site I might give you a promotion for that or not or steal it which was a really fun way of getting a game as well because it didn't cost anything you didn't have to ask permission so um funny enough that was the most popular way to get content and what we found was this kind of pirate culture around games stealing games was the cheapest and easiest way to get your games so stealing was really ramp it uh just an example of stealing uh we have a we have a number called time to steal which is how fast did your game get stolen the fastest game my content was stolen was in 10 minutes so the moment I put it up on a web page someone took that game they removed the URL lock which U me meant you can only play it on that page they decompiled the file They removed all my Logos they recompiled the file they blocked all my outgoing links and then they put it on their website and then they tried to get that Google SEO to drive all that traffic to it and that was in 10 minutes from releasing

the game on the page and the reason they would do this is because the first person to Market was the one who ended up getting the traffic getting the the Google juice to get them onto that page um because we had that that community on Newgrounds and other places players were really worried about us when games got stolen we got a ton of emails we had players that said hey I I really love your games but I'm really worried that uh this other website is stealing your content um do you want me to go talk to them for you and it no I can go talk to them but that's that's super great and and I really appreciate that you care about me we just had these sort of interactions with our players and this was a really cool thing traffic and revenue was driven to these larger websites and portals and was being taken away from us so so developers had to start thinking how are we going to make money on this stolen content and that's when we saw the birth of the sponsorship Market in 2005 we realized that there was a stolen game economy here that games are going to get stolen there was a way to make money off of that and almost as a really

Cooperative initiative portals started paying Developers for putting their branding in their games when that game got stolen with The Branding on a different site it drove traffic back to the main site and it actually worked really well um for example this is Kingdom Rush and uh with the Armor Games branding the traditional sponsorship was really around just an exchange of funds for a logo a little bit of an animation usually some sound effects uh to developers would co-brand or they would uh find some special Arrangement uh really depended on who you were talking to as a publisher or as a sponsor um but at the time the sponsorships were really meager I retrofitted a game with a logo and some other things they asked for and I earned an incredible amount of money I earned $25 uh for that and that was for an exclusive title um now for me in college this was an amazing amount of money because I already made the game and I was just was looking for a little bit of income and I started replicating this

model I realized that if I kept giving this game to other people that I would get more money so anyone want to guess the second it was actually less it was $20 um well actually it wasn't because they never paid me they ran away with the game and I never saw them ever again and the hard part was this was normal developers were constantly getting screwed over by these really shady portals these people asking them if they could have the content and then never responding after they give them the content and it was getting really bad in 2005 it was bad but it going into 2006 it felt like it was getting worse um games were getting stolen payments were not getting made uh like like I said before the decompiled recompiled code we started finding eBay listings for our games like self-starting websites have your own Flash game portal and they were selling our content uh websites were blocking our outgoing links there was hostage tactics that was a really fun time when uh I would have my game stolen and someone would say I I'll remove it

for you if you give me some money and that was a real thing that portals did uh and there was a really strong feeling of you owe us we're giving you the traffic we're featuring your game this is this is the kind a relationship we should have and this was kind of gross and I I I really want to say that this is really a handful of bad portals this isn't everyone this isn't Newgrounds this was just a really set of bad portals and they were all rising up together just because there was this Gold Rush on the flash game economy but luckily in 2006 there started to be a turnaround um developers were getting treated terribly they needed to be a champion so there were really three companies that really stood up and said it's time for change the first is moi media which opened in 2006 by Jameson and Bob and it was a self-service approach you could go online and get yourself some in-game ads some analytics and distribution you could check on where your game's being stolen and located uh and the other interesting part is now that games are getting stolen with ads in them you can

now make money when your game got stolen with those in-game ads there was different opportunities that were starting to rise up because Mochi media came in and disrupted the model this is kind of a homer pick but congregate is also a really important part of flash games rising up when founders Jim and Emily Greer opened congregate they really wanted to create a place where devs could get a REV share on the games that they post to the to the site uh so every developer would get a REV share of the banner ads and later in-game purchases when those became available and conget also was really really saw the importance of developer communities player communities interacting with each other and engaging it's a really important part of making games and the final Champion is Flash game license which was opened by Adam in 2007 and it was a place where you could go onto the website post your game and sponsors could openly bid on your game or would openly offer up how much they're willing to pay and what this did is it really made the flash game model really transparent we started to see how

much developers were making it made sponsors really um start to battle each other to try to get the best titles and we started to see a shift back towards the developer we started seeing that sponsorships were getting competitive around 2005 sponsorships were reaching $1,000 but by the end of 2006 they were topping five and maybe $10,000 for content and the high quality content was always in demand and they were always getting pit against each other on FGL and other places and this was the first time weed Ed seeing developers were reaching full-time status they started being able to pay to do this full-time and their hobby is now suddenly the thing they're working on every single day and this also really in a really strange way strengthened the relationship between sponsors and developers sponsors started to the the best sponsors started to stand out and developers started to get to know those sponsors and there was this happy sort of relationship that formed when you found the perfect publisher or sponsor uh the new options that started to open up from these from this uh was

Revenue shares uh M media ads and content contest and competitions and then site licenses all these sort of evolutions of the original traditional sponsorship model and with this swing back to the developers in the Forefront with this Innovative content continuing to come out and people becoming full-time developers it really started the flash game Renaissance in 2006 and it was a really pivotal point for flash games where uh this really insane collection of developers and websites and and fans and people in this industry became an industry this the flash games weirdly became a a game industry and it it was really awesome and it attracted so many new talented developers and games were getting uh jump started through flash uh games like Dad and me by Tom Fulp on new rounds or d uh with artist Dan Paladin and dust ball uh was a a collab that was one of those games that really set the bar for wow this game feels like it's like a PC console

title this is a really high quality Flash game and really kind of defined this the quality bar for 2005 2006 uh we saw games like kitten Cannon which was this really early viral Title by Dan Fleming and it it kickstarted an entire genre of launch games and and really got people creating this sort of content that went viral and uh was quick play but had a lot of depth to it we saw games like triaid by Edmund and Floren who uh it was one of the earliest physics based games on in Flash and was this really artistic vision and really kind of changed the way that we look at games on flash this this Innovation continued to grow especially under the sponsorship model developers could be really creative and and build whatever they wanted because they knew that the most Innovative work the most creative work the most polished work was going to be the one that got funded so they continue to have free rein to work on pretty much whatever they wanted without a ton of guidance and portals kept pushing the Developers to be more Innovative to do better games that are

more polished and to stand out because when the developer was winning the portals were winning and this Innovation and this push for Innovation iterated so many genres in Flash uh we had we had games like uh desktop Tower Defense that really innovated the Tower Defense genre we had launch games like kitten Cannon uh defense games which are more one-sided tower defense game puzzle physics game uh puzzle physics games I said that backwards uh Escape the Room Games I yeah we just had all these genres that were erupting from Flash and were continuing to be innovated in Flash and we started to see that developers were using flash as a benchmark to see if their innovative ideas worked one of the earliest ones we saw was an from meta from metanet who created the game in 2005 in Flash and was a cult classic immediately it was one of the first browser games to win an igf audience award or an igf award in general and it hit consoles and handhelds in 2008 it was one of the first Xbox Live titles but seeing the

success in Flash was what let that game end up on Xbox Live and continue to let it continue to live on PlayStation 4 and other platforms uh similarly uh Super Meat Boy was originally a 3-we development project in Flash that was launched on Newgrounds and in the first few weeks we actually were seeing that it was getting close to half a million to a million downloads just playing this game and that was a really clear indicator uh that there is something special here and that's why edmin went and made it into a full title um this is like the early story of indie game the movie that you uh may not have seen this is what was behind the scenes going on before uh Edmund was on camera doing that this really opened up the idea of reality that that games would that great games would rise up get shared everywhere would get posted on social media or different websites and and viral was becoming an accepted real way to make games and um it was wrecking our we sites uh we were getting on dig and

farc and stumble upon and it was uh the amount of traffic traffic we were getting was taking down our websites in fact uh one of the scariest things in college was I had no money and I had but I had my game on a website and I got a call from my bandwidth provider saying that you're not only out of bandwidth but you're double up on what you are doing and you didn't deploy your banner ads yet so you weren't making money on this game yet so I immediately had to turn off my website and I couldn't turn it on for over a month until the the ashes were scattered and and um I was really sad and um yeah it's a sad story um uh some games went extremely viral um we have all played quap uh by Bennett FY uh it's this really wonderful bendy joint controlling running game and it broke the internet it was just it's this incredibly incredibly easy game to share and to play with other people even though it's a one-player game uh it's one of the most viral flash games of all time and

it was and we all rallied and cheered uh when it was featured on a television show it was on the office on NBC that you could see the office workers playing quap in the background um it was also the inspiration of maybe the flash the best flash cosplay ever done um we uh saw games like Line Rider which was one of the first games to have that sharing culture uh building tracks freehand sharing them playing them it had currently line riter has 1.7 million videos on YouTube and with some of the earliest pieces of YouTube content being shared you can look at videos that are over 10 years old on YouTube that were from line line riter we continued to see our community grow as we were more Innovative as we attracted more people we worked with different people and these communities started to appear all across the world there was micro communities in various different countries there was online communities uh through Newgrounds uh Kupa tigsource and developers hosted their own player communities it was this really amazing time where we we could talk about games over AOL Instant

Messenger which was our uh chat program of choice um we were talking on email forums we're learning how to program together we were growing together as a community and it was really important for Flash to have these communities growing together and ludum D was another community that was growing and we found that a lot of games coming out of ludum D were flash games because it was just a natural progression for these tiny little experimental games that you could work on um we saw a lot of flash developers but between ludum dare 19 and 28 building great flash content and the younger developers started to rise we saw developers like Tyle glil uh who worked on closure and Aether uh start to uh come out of the scene because he was given the opportunity he was 15 or 16 at the time and he created a procedurally generated physics-based terrain game called crazy car at age 15 and it was at 2 million plays by the end of uh 2005 another developer that I know personally Chris Jeffs he he sent me a

quote and he said I never I never even knew I'd fall into games industry at the age of 16 having full creative freedom to make games that anyone could play in their browser was insanely cool and without Flash I wouldn't be doing what I loved he was he was given that opportunity to stand out and to do things uh in games which was really powerful part of flash um here's a longer quote from ANA who was the developer relations manager at uh Nickelodeon or addicting games um this is one of my favorite stories in Flash so I wanted to share all of it uh we had a developer who made irreverent slightly minimalist games we found based on his humor and skill he was maybe 25 uh but his dad always signed the contracts which we thought was really odd and then one day he sent us an email saying that he bought his first car and we were like oh that's kind of late for buying your first car um but it turns out he was only 16 and Not only was he buying his first car with the money he had received from licensing his flash games but he had just got his driver's license The Flash game Community really let young developers rise up and get their

first titles out there and succeed a lot of this was dual due to the fact that tool sets started to emerge around the flash game scene there was a lot of really great titles coming out of these tools as well uh uh tools like flash Punk who was a Chevy Ray Johnson's library for making Flash Games it really uh helped Elevate developers and get them past the initial problems of that flash developers had to figure out like how are you going to deal with Delta time or animation or collision and it resulted in titles like give up robot by Matt Thorson the Creator who went on to make TowerFall or radical fishing by the lambir team and super puzzle platformer and then we had tools like flixel which was this gorgeous um tile based editor which pretty much covered everything you had to do in games and if you were going to make a tile based game and that was created by Adam Saltzman and ended up with titles like cannonbal and looming and Tower of heaven and then Starling came out later in the in the game uh by Gamu and it was a really nice tool because it leveraged the uh access

to the GPU for the first time which was amazing uh because everything was on the CPU before that and we had games like incredipede and Samus and haunt the house come out and we saw flash evolve as well we we were in action script one we're moving into two and now but but now we're in Three which was objectoriented programming uh more mature tools and animation performance was getting better so everything was on an upward trajectory um and Flash gave us all these robust tools but they also gave us a bunch of really weird Tools in some ways we weren't sure if they knew what we wanted or what we were going to do with these things I feel like they kind of gave them to us just to see what would happen um so as curious developers we just kind of ran with it uh one of the first examples is Flash had local save objects uh these wouldn't reset with your browser cookies so a developer named rendo uh created a game called you only live once and the first time you play through the game you get as far as you can and once you die you're dead and play ERS could not figure out how to reset the game every time they reset the

browser it would show a different scene of what was going on in the game the first time there was a funeral the second time you see the body game buried in the ground each time the player frustratingly trying to figure out how to reset the cookie so they can try to get further in the game they would see another scene I think there was like six or seven scenes it was really hilarious um we knew where you're loading your flash files from and players didn't know this and some portals didn't even know this um if there was a portal we didn't like we did things like mess with the difficulty or flip the screen upside down or we we we just played these practical jokes as developers um but we also used that to our advantage we sometimes created specialized content for example if we knew the game was being played on new grounds which is somewhere we really liked we would put in special features or kind of Pander to Newgrounds a little bit um we were very much a pandering audience in Flash so um flash did this insane thing where you could load a flash inside any other flash file and you could have that flash file load another flash file inside that flash file and you could do that at runtime you could do that whenever you wanted and it was this really weird

thing that you could build these nested experiences through um you could also talk to other flash windows I had a game called achievement unlock 2 where I had one window open where you were playing the main game but if you just weirdly opened up another window it would take you to the iced coffee mod which was a counter to the hot coffee mod from uh Grand Theft Auto and there was uh iced coffee there um and there's secret achievements in that window um another fun thing that we got access to is Nintendo Wii's Opera browser decided one day it was just going to support Flash and we decided that we were going to take advantage of that so a lot of developers started creating their own portals around we based flash games and we it wasn't it wasn't an amazing experience in fact it ran kind of slow and it was kind of it was kind of awful but uh it was the first time that we got to say that we made a console game and and then just smile at our parents um and Flash was kind of crazy and and players were really engaged with us

engaged with us but one of the funniest things that also happened a lot is players Mok our bugs as features um a developer named Oliver Joyce made a g game called swords and sandals and uh he was using an array but didn't really um realize that if you put commas in the players's name box that you could kind of screw with the array that had all the save data in it so players started creating this phenomenon called The Comma hack and they would create these videos that were getting quarter of a million half a million plays in them to explain the kamah hack and this culture around hacking this game opened up and when Oliver went to go make the next swords and sandals the biggest question he always got from players was is the kamah hack feature going to be in the next game because that was our favorite part of that game so flash had really weird features but it also kind of let us be weird ourselves we created all these really odd interesting kind of out there games um um one of the best examples is don't your pants which was a text based

Adventure it it's an it's it's a 20 second simulator of walking to the bathroom as a tech space adventure and it was one of those games that was just really obscure and really different and we point out and say oh yeah that was Flash um that team went on three years later to make Rogue Legacy and uh if you're walking around inside the castle in Rogue Legacy you'll actually see pictures uh from this game we had games like Robot Unicorn Attack which uh for me I think it really defined the kind of games that Adult Swim worked on and and the style and the the song Always by aaer was um a song that I can still hear in my head in the middle of the night and it this game just kind of blew up into the stratosphere and had a c and had this really nice cult following and the had ports to IOS and Android and this is going to be the one slide where I talk about myself um I worked on a game called achievement unlocked which was a game uh where where all you do is collect achievements and that's really

the goal of the game so just doing really dumb things inside this environment and whether it's uh typing in the Konami Code whether it's refreshing the page whether it's um not touching any buttons for 5 minutes like those sorts of things that um aren't really a game but players seem to be really enjoy collecting and filling out lists so uh I made 500 things to do and just let players spend their afternoon trying to figure out what those were um it was uh my favorite part of the game was there's a any pig stuck in a hamster tube um it's just that's just me though uh The Flash game industry continued to grow and by 2009 2010 the trajectory was insane we were seeing popular releases for games getting over a million plays in the first 24 hours mochim media at the time was serving 40,000 portals uh there's a ton of tiny Flash game sites and we were seeing our content spread across thousands of websites and we had our first flash gaming Summit we met up in San Francisco here uh back in 20

2010 and we for the first time were face Toof face with each other because we had never seen each other we we worked on the internet and every once in a while we sent chat messages I didn't I didn't meet the artist I worked with for 3 to four years until flash gaming Summit in 2009 these portals were getting crazy traffic mini clip was hovering around 250 worldwide new grounds armor games congre all top 1,000 addicting games pulling up on Mini Clip and the the new models for making money were still rolling in there were sponsorships with bonuses there was pre-roll ads interstitial ads and microtransactions were starting to come into the game too and by 2010 we were seeing sponsorship prizes rising to over $100,000 this is just a reminder these are games where we just are going to do whatever we want we're just going to put in all these features we're going to do the art in the way we want to the player or the um the team we want to build and

we're going to get paid up to $100,000 for this game that's a pretty remarkable thing and uh the sponsorship deals were getting even more complex and uh developers were starting to get their rights secured for sequels because the best developers were starting to get locked down by platform by 2009 we were seeing that 30% of Flash game developers were using this as their full-time job um and 60% of developers were just working on their they were just uh working solo on a lot of their projects um and the other fact we started to learn is that 16% of all developers were making more than $1,000 a month on their games we started to see lots of different regions start to benefit from flash games a lot of smaller um it wasn't just us it wasn't just Europe we started to see these uh smaller game communities start to rise in other countries as well with flash Rising we by 2011 we saw over 18,700 titles on con.com in just 2011 alone that's averaging 50 a day and

that's around every 30 minutes someone is uploading a new game to congregate uh it's also worth noting that new rounds at the time was uh peing somewhere around 200 uh for games coming in every single day or sorry animations and games coming in every single day there's a lot of content being made we also saw the rise of social games which were uh all flash-based and we're starting on a new portal called or a new platform called Facebook uh and Facebook games has this big bang that started with a gold rush and many larger companies were exploding on the scene trying to uh cash in on this new uh social media thing that was going on uh the age of microtransactions begins and we start to see that uh these microtransactions were starting to be used in uh casual social games but also MMOs and RPGs and we started to see that flash games were making a lot of money uh Farm bille in 2009 made a billion dollars in Revenue by 2013 um it's pretty safe to say that this is the highest grossing Flash game we've ever seen and then additionally in

Candy Crush uh while it was also a mobile title was seeing somewhere around 1 to$ 1.33 billion in Revenue a year we started to see MMOs and RPGs rise up the East was starting to localize in the west we had games like War Tunes rise of Mythos coming in we saw that AAA games were getting involved in Flash uh autodesk's uh scale form allowed you to build your UI and in pieces uh for your game inside Flash and then export to uh whatever you working in C++ uh and we and games like Elders Scroll Skyrim and Borderlands and Starcraft were building all of their UI in Flash um one of the funniest things is um I'm skipping ahead a little bit but develop uh players used to get really worked up and saying I don't want flash games on Steam I don't want to be playing those flash games and then you look at their library and it's full of these titles so they just never knew that uh flash was part of the games that that they already loved and played we started to see uh reactive content start

to emerge uh Peta created a game called Cooking Mama Mama kills animals which was right around Thanksgiving it's a game about um cutting open a turkey just in time for Thanksgiving it was real gross but uh it got a lot of press and news and uh we started to see other controversial titles and reactive content start to come out we had games like VTEC Rampage come out and the News went absolutely insane for that and games like smuggle truck uh which is also known as Snuggle Truck uh for platforms who wouldn't accept smuggle truck oops sorry the flash game art scene was evolving as well this the art in flash games went from these really beautiful rainbow gradients and in staticky 12 frames per second tweens to these really gorgeous uh frame by frame animated titles we had games like alien hominid dad and me from Dan Paladin uh nitrum was Finding their visual style and it was gorgeous and continues to be gorgeous in the game they release for iOS um I really like nitrone because they really embody The Flash game spirit

in a lot of the titles they make for IOS and Android amonita design was building these really Lush uh beautiful environments in a place that was normally just reserved for vector and for um handdrawn Vector animation so uh this was a really cool uh piece that was starting to come in uh jimp who is a developer I worked with for a very long time uh these really gorgeous artistic cartoony poppy uh animation Styles and art and you games like sushi cat came from him we also saw this throwback to this 8bit style t uh was working on games like hexagon and VV v v v v v and don't look back those six okay uh and we also saw orol which is one of our favorite flash portals and these really gorgeous beautiful um cute anim ation uh this is a game where you have to raise and lower your head as a giraffe to kiss the

various giraffes that are going by it's really great so that brings us to 2010 and the arrival of mobile which is a very fun time for Flash uh flash was struggling with Mobile Apple and Google um was opening their smartphones to third party creation but there was hesitating towards allowing flash content onto the onto the devices and apple especially was really worried about how content was going to be used on their devices this is a brand new device and it made a lot of sense that they were concerned um they were so concerned that Steve Jobs wrote 1,700 words about Flash and and this was really odd for the time because at the time as developers we were thinking well flash is just this little plugin that we use to make games and to have someone like Steve Jobs who just released this incredible smartphone to be talking about Flash in this way was kind of it was hurtful we didn't really understand it but um he said flash is a crossplatform development tool it's not adobe's goal to help developers write

the best iPhone iPad and iPod apps and we start to see this emergence of this war this war of Apple versus Adobe uh this photo is a little gruesome maybe I shouldn't used that one um it was during a time when the iPhone was drawing a lot of attention Steve Jobs said flash isn't the Right Way Forward HTML5 is and he he brought up a lot of shortcomings which were true we had shortcomings in the flash game Space heavy CPU usage um everyone's had that like laptop fan turn on and start worrying and then the battery drop really low because that we were using CPU a lot of games were based in CPU because that's how it was originally written um there was constantly these security flaws and patches having to be deployed uh players don't like updating flash every 3 days it's really not fun but it it makes sense because when you have 99% of machines having this technology it's obviously going to be the thing that hackers are going to Target and try to get get into but flash still tried to go to mobile and Flash landed on several

Android phones and in the pal Prix and other devices but it didn't last long uh congr had attempted to create a small portal of games on Google's app using a lot of phones were using flash at the time um and Google shut it down saying that it violated their apps terms of service for creating an app store environment so there was really this push back against Flash content going anywhere near Mobile phones um and Apple outright blocked the export of third party tools to create apps they wanted you to be building games in their ecosystem in the way that they wanted to and so Adobe responded by running these ads that were a little backhanded they they said um we love Apple but we just don't like how they do business um it was it was a really odd thing the media Outlets started to say flash was dead um and this was the first time we started hearing flash is dead Long Live HTML 5 and this was the first death of Flash and I put death of Flash in quotes because there will be a death of flash every 3 months from 2010 all the way to

now uh nearly every week a news article was running saying flash is dead another stake in the heart of adobe and uh there was websites popping up called occupied flash which was trying to get people to uninstall flash off of uh like computers from people who don't know how to uninstall flash they wanted you to go around and help get things uninstalled it was this really weird movement to get flash off of people's computers and people were calling me worried saying why are you making games that are going to break my computer why are you making Flash Games my relatives were worried about me they said are you going to have a living because Flash games are dead right it was it was this weird heavily covered rally by the news organization that about a browser plugin which is just which is really bizarre and and the industry was scrambling to hide flash we started to see a lot of these brands starting to kind of off you skate The Flash part by Flash game license became FGL and Flash gaming Summit became fgs

and um devs were starting to remove Flash from their Studio names because they didn't want uh that associated with them and even Adobe Flash at one point decided yeah we're going to become Adobe animate um so there was this kind of backpedaling on flash and um Adobe responded by saying we got to compete and start ramping up their Tech and at one point you could export Unity into a flash file and it was really cool uh and they started announcing that they were working on action script next or action script 4 depending on how you like to look at it and we started to see a new generation of flash programming start to emerge and there was Gamepad support coming so we could make Gamepad games and that was the coolest thing in the world but um they also around the same time started saying that they're going to charge a 9% rev share on anything you make that makes over $50,000 but only if you use these certain Technologies in this order uh which was really confusing for Developers velers and developers were already paying a monthly fee for these game or to make games with Adobe or were

paying 700 a year for the upgrade every year so they were really confused on why they had to pay a REV share on top of paying for the tools um later Adobe would drop action script four plans Unity would pull out their Adobe flash support so it wasn't looking really good for Flash and developers were really worried and they didn't know what to do they were confused they didn't know how to go forward flash felt like it was dying but only because everyone was tell it was dying in reality The Flash portals were still doing really well um do they stick with flash the tools they know and love do they move to native code to try to be on mobile do they uh move to Unity which was uh starting to appear and was starting to export to web um no HTML 5 our um our savior was uh was being rallied super hard by everyone everyone wanted HTML5 to come into existence and to replace Flash and to U even Steve Jobs called it out like seven or eight times in his in his uh very long uh essay on flash and um h15 was

really a good idea it was going to usher in non-proprietary game development we were going to kind of be able to get in there and create new Tools around it uh it did video streaming it had multimedia support it sounded like a good idea but it wasn't there at the time in 2010 in 2010 HML 5 was still a draft it wasn't widely adopted by browsers it wasn't uniformally adopted uh there wasn't that tool parody there weren't the that we enjoyed in flash available to us in HML 5 and CS CSS and JavaScript so um it was a little early and there was starting to become this Gap in technology because developers were worried about Flash HML 5 wasn't there yet so what are we going to do and in 2013 we start to see the collapse of sponsorships as sponsorships just started to decline it was really it was a lot of things but um one of the biggest ones is that web ads started to decline in Revenue um this was from a few different factors mobile was up and

coming ad block was coming in and Wrecking havoc on people's ads um uh developers needed to start using inapp purchases and other things to supplement their monetization because uh it was no longer feasible to just build whatever you wanted send it out there and hope that banner ads were going to drive the revenue for it uh less games were coming out because there was less money there and and lack of sponsorship spent less TR so there was there became this decline from 2013 to 2016 um to now of of all the portals starting to slowly decline in traffic um to kind of simplify this graph I I just averaged all of it there was this uh slow decline downward the sponsorship Market pretty much slows to a halt the large portals slow down or even just stop on sponsorship there was no long longer enough value to be working on these really expensive games uh the smaller portals have to start folding because the large portals aren't

creating new content and there's no way for them to get new content if the large portals aren't sponsoring and by 2014 we saw muchim media shut down and the company was one of those early companies that really came in and helped us make games and and be creative and be able to self- serve with these tools and services so that was a really painful moment for our community and it happened right before GDC um in addition that FGL in 2016 announced that they were going to slow down and stop the sponsorship Marketplace as well there um FGL is still working on other tools and services for developers but uh the main sponsorship portal is down and we start to see developers leaving Flash and they spread out in all directions um we had developers who were uh staying in web games working on HTML 5 working on Unity export we had others working on mobile PC games uh but many developers actually just got up and left the scene they went and they went on to work on careers uh one of my favorite developers became a travel agent and

loves being a travel agent um but some still remained and made games they made it work they adjusted to this this crazy collapse of sponsorships by finding ways to continue to make profitable games and it was really this amazing thing that um even today Flash game developers are making money on their games after flash we continue to see the exports of uh of unity and unreal and these other really great Technologies 3D is starting to become more commonplace in browser games and we really start to see this shift in technology usage on congregate especially around the turn of uh 2010 when the uh uh panic over flash really began and even now in 2017 uh a minority of our content coming in to congregate is Flash but it's still coming in and it's still uh being enjoyed by our players the biggest uptick we've seen is HTML 5 taking off

uh and that's a really great sign for the web platform new tools emerge for those developers who were working in Flash we have H hack flixel and openfl and we got a lot of great titles out of that uh games like papers please and Defenders Quest and Cardinal Quest we start to see new portals arrive we get to see icho and game jolt come in and provide these really great user experiences around downloadable games and we start to see portals also move into publishing a lot of these portals were working with developers who were making really great games on a daily basis so becoming a publisher made a lot of sense for them uh congregate mini clip and armor games are some of the bigger ones that turned into Publishers as well and Flash continues to slowly get phased out we continue to see uh first banner ads were starting to slow down and then we start seeing ads getting paused um soon games will be clicked to start uh there's been this slow progression of flash functionalities becoming less

functional so now that we're in 2017 what have we learned from all this what is what is everything we've done since 1998 really taught us and what has flash games really done for us we learned that ubiquity is incredible we learned that being able to put your games anywhere for anyone to be played across the world is an incredible experience spending time porting getting your game ready doing all that is a lot of work but being able to export once and get your game everywhere is an amazing thing and we haven't had a technology reach that level of ubiquity yet through flash we learned that sharing culture is really important being engaged with your users being engaged with other developers trying things you're not willing to try with people you haven't met before but that you really want to work with and then sharing your work with others it's a really important part of being a game developer and it's a really important part about being creative and thinking outside the box and being comfortable with what you

do we learned what it meant to be in Indie we learned that we learned that the modern indie game scene was really influenced by Flash and we saw that we could make money to eat we could become business owners we we learned how to do taxes uh we made quirky little games and and we ran our own businesses and we were innovated and we embraced it we set a precedence on how game developers and their games should be treated we thought about our relationships with Publishers and sponsors and how it used to be awful we found a middle ground we found a way to work together we found a commonplace way for really great content to be featured so that it was a symbiotic relationship we were collaborative we weren't aggressive towards each other and we continue not to talk about Flash's impact on games enough I feel like that under the stigma of flash we we really don't give it the chance to breathe and to talk about games or being here right now is is a privilege for me because I get to talk about Flash games

and we we just do not talk about it enough and I have a constant fear that flash games one day won't be with us that we'll lose millions of games because browser support will end or that we won't remember all the important things that flash games have given us and the reality is that ubiquity is going to die with flash if we don't find ways to encourage our platforms that we work with now to try to reach ubiquity fast flash games have pushed Indie Games forward in a really big way it's a big part of our history and um it's always lived in the shadow of the uh indie game movie and the and the uprising of the modern Indie and and which is a really great story and is a really great part of our industry but um it's important to look back just one further and look at flash games but ultimately the thing we need to really focus on are the things that we're going to lose with flash and making sure that in the future we have these things for ourselves but also for the future generation of developers that come after us those things like Community working together with other

developers showing your game being feeling like you can do that in a way that's productive and working with players to make sure your games are fun accessibility making sure that everyone can get to your games making sure that your games are not only accessible to the players that are playing at the library but are also maybe playing on their phone or somewhere else rapid Innovation the ability to just game Jam to make just make stuff that's the most important thing you can do as game developers is to make and Rapid Innovation rapid iteration getting your games up is so important and of course ubiquity the ability to be anywhere and everywhere that you could ever ever want to be with your game is so important and this these are the things we need to chase as an industry and these are the things that are really really important for us to support and that's [Music] it [Music]

thank you guys um I have a few things to remind everyone about um please fill out your surveys it's really good feedback for me this is my first time talking at GDC so I'd love your feedback um I've uh I also wanted to point out that uh if you want to talk to me after this talk uh there's a meeting area right outside the hall that I'd be happy to uh meet you guys at um and I think that's it so I think I have like two minutes so maybe two questions go ahead thanks John uh that was a fantastic and very Bittersweet uh uh lecture so my name is Mark uh I have been making Flash games for both 8 to 10 years and my question is more specifically on congregate on the user side so that graph was very informative it seemed like sure HTML 5 was spiking and the Swift was declining slightly but

what is the the demographic of congregate on the web how how do they feel about Flash games like do they play a flash games still and they're happy about it or they're like the media and press they think it's flash games are evil and yeah and and they they avoid them so I'm curious to hear your thoughts of what the congregate user base thinks of flash now yeah the the reality is that the reality is that flash games that were made 15 years ago still work today and a lot of the games on our site still function just the way they did 15 years ago which is pretty amazing and especially as a developer being able to look at uh I uploaded my first game to congregate Newgrounds and um man it's an awful game but it still works and uh players what we've realized on congr is that players who want to play the games that they're coming there to play will actually go and whatever way they have to go and play those games uh when we saw the Unity Web players start to get pulled out of chrome we saw a shift of

about 10 to 20% of our users switching over to Firefox so that they could still engage with the Unity Web Player games uh players want to play this content um players have voiced that they're nostalgic about this content now that games are much older maybe they um started playing these games and it inspired them to be a developer so there's still developers are really still excited about this content they're still excited about Flash games they're excited about where uh the future of more 3D titles for web will be going and it's for the most part uh they are not voicing their anger towards it as much as they're worried that the developers won't be making games in Flash anymore thank you my name is Mata I uh ran a company making Flash games and animations every two weeks for seven years that was where I started this year I'm a speaker talking about yourl stuff uh which is great fun um one of the things that really struck me about flash games uh a decade ago especially in the George W bush era was how many how many developers were using flash games and

gameplay mechanics as a form of political commentary MH uh and I I would love to see a talk later on maybe next year or something like that about uh political commentary through flash games yeah sure people like that idea apparently um so I mean what do you think the future is of of games cuz there was such an easy on-ramp to make games with flash yeah do do do you think there's a future of political games that would never be picked up by a publisher is there a platform where people can do this in the future do you think as as long as the web Is An Open Marketplace where we're all able to access it in the same way that we do now that there's not any sense of some people get priority over the Internet over others I think as long as we have that we'll continue to have a place where we can create games without the struggle of a platform saying no you can't do that the ability to upload our own games to our own websites I think it's incredibly important that the web stays open and that it continues to be a

place where we can voice our opinions through our titles yeah very much here here thank you I might have time for one more hi my name is John I'm journalist uh you voiced a fear earlier that flash games would disappear and not be preserved even though they're an integral part of the history of indie games are you aware of any efforts to preserve and maintain an archive of Flash game in a playable form uh is that logistically feasible and is there anything that congregate can do to help that LE yeah it's something that we've talked about internally about uh what will be the future of flash games but um we haven't landed on anything and I know that a bunch of uh various portals and developers are also thinking about it as well whether it's porting content or moving it towards something else um I don't think we have a really good plan in place yet um Emily's looking at the microphone who's the CEO of congregate so I'm the CEO of congre and

I Emily said that she had a meeting had several meetings this week on how to preserve Flash and is it going to be an ongoing conversation on what to do with it cool all right I'll be uh right outside thank you so much you [Applause] [Music] guys