Two great Flash-related posts
There’s two great posts related to Flash surfacing today:
CoderHump.com has an open letter to Adobe asking for them to make Flash the default console for the web. This is a developer-centric post, focusing on weaknesses of Flash as a generic platform for game development:
Adobe, make Flash like unto a console! Give us consistent performance! Give us excellent tools! Flex Builder is not that great, Adobe. Your compilers could be a lot better, too. Don’t worry too much about lots of fancy features. People who have to have super high end 3d and do not want to run everywhere will use tools like Torque or Unity that do 3d really well. Be everywhere, run well, be easy to develop for, and you will be loved and well rewarded.
Adobe, I have a vested interest in you succeeding. Please listen to my words. I have spent years developing game middleware on a variety of platforms. Now I am working with Flash. If Flash dominates the game industry, it will be possible for me to afford to eat.
A lot of the gems aren’t in the post, but in the comment thread that follows — worth reading.
And the inimitable Dan Cook of Lost Garden has a wonderful analysis of the business models behind Flash game development and where they are broken — and what a developer can do to fix it.
When you design your game, pick three or four revenue streams and build them into your game. Here are some categories of users that you may want keep covered.
- People who don’t want to pay: Advertising is a good option to keep around. A few hundred bucks is still money in the bank.
- People who are interested in more of the same: Once you’ve established the value of your game, some players want more. Give them more levels, more puzzles, more enemies in exchange for cash.
- People who are interested in status or identity improvements: Some people see games as means of expression and identity. Give them items that let them express themselves or customize their experience.
- People who have limited time: Some people live busy lives and want to consume your game when they desire and how they desire. Cheat codes, experience multipliers and other systems that bypass the typical progression all help satisfying this customer need.
Looks like this is just part one of a lengthier series of articles — I look forward to the next one!
11 Responses to “Two great Flash-related posts”
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Yeah – that second article is the “bizzomb”, as the kidizzles say.
I’m honestly opposed to Flash becoming the default game platform on the web. It stands against everything the web (standards) have become where it’s open and free from control by any corporation.
Flash is unfortunately a necessity for the time being, which is what probably made sites like YouTube so successful, and hopefully Metaplace of course. But to dominate the game market on the web would be like the travesty of depending on directx (over opengl) to make 3D desktop games.
Well, if HTML5 keeps progressing, it could make a run at it. But I suspect that will take a little while yet. I don’t think the battle is anywhere near over.
BTW, Adobe has been opening stuff up to some degree: http://www.openscreenproject.org/about/faq.html
I would personally prefer to see HTML 5 expanded and adopted in ways that deprecate Flash. The standards are finally starting to move. There are some nifty canvas examples out there lately, that’s very promising. The video tag codec issue popped up recently, it’s really one of the bigger hurdles.
It’s not just a question of Adobe opening up, it’s a question of adoption. For mobile browsers especially, Flash doesn’t have traction. HTML 5 does, or at least Apple et al say they intend to follow the standard as much as possible.
I’d hate to see Flash become the default standard for games, it’s not open and I’d like the web to move towards open standards that are not controlled by one organization.
The codec issue for video is going to stall HTML 5 as long as the HTML standard deems it necessary to have a codec defined. I’m of the mind that video should be treated like images are from the standard’s point of view. The IMG tag does not restrict or define the image formats that can be decoded by a browser implementation. The VIDEO tag should not define the codec but video codecs have licensing and patent baggage associated with them that the image formats do not. That means that there is money at stake and when there’s money involved, a fight normally ensues. This one happens to be about the open source ideal for Ogg Theora versus the hardware accelerated H.264. Both sides have good points which means it won’t be resolved anytime soon.
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/decoding-the-html-5-video-codec-debate.ars
Stuff like that keeps HTML 5 from becoming a standard so all we really have at the moment is Flash as a substitute vessel for rich media.
#2: “I’m honestly opposed to Flash becoming the default game platform on the web. It stands against everything the web (standards) have become where it’s open and free from control by any corporation.”
Honestly, it’s not that closed. The compiler is open source, the VM is documented and open source. The SWF format is documented and can be legally used. There are several independent implementations at varying levels of quality (gameswf, RAD Game Tools’ G, Scaleform).
Also, it actually works and has a minimal tool chain.
Compare this to HTML5 which is suffering from design by committee, standards adoption issues, implementation compatibility, etc. Not that it couldn’t be just as good a platform, but Flash is here, it works right now, and Adobe is committed to making it good.
I use Flex Builder at home for some personal prototyping projects, and compared to most of the programmer tools I am regularly tortured by, I find it to be a delight to use. Admittedly, I was already an Eclipse fan before using it, so it was a pretty easy sell. Sure, it could use a little work here and there, but I hesitate to agree that it’s “not that great.”
Visual Studio leaves me constantly wondering if Microsoft actually uses their own IDE. It always reminds me of that old song from the Muppet Movie that went, “I hope that somethin’ better comes along…”
@Ben Garney: It’s the roadmap with Flash that isn’t as open, which is the most important part. SWF is open sourced, but can anyone viably fork it? Maybe some changes have gone back upstream, but my guess is they’ve been almost entirely bug-related. All of the real development is proprietary from Adobe, which is the main barrier they’ve had to getting Flash accepted as an actual standard (rather than defacto).
Now that all of the major browsers are actively pursuing other solutions, Adobe’s opportunity is gone.
HTML 5 isn’t just some faceless committee effort. Browser developers from Apple, Google, Firefox and Opera are all involved. The codec argument is very apt, because for a change it isn’t just assumed they won’t settle on a baseline, they’re actually debating it. Things are moving that used to be static. Read the workgroup’s debate and you can see how it’s spurned new efforts and investments into pursuing the answers. Look at the HTML 5 spec itself, it’s so much more fleshed out now. Firefox 3.5 demonstrates much of it is usable. Webkit dev versions are getting advanced too.
There’s a strong push, especially from Google, to get a solution to video on the web that doesn’t involve Flash. Apple has chosen to shun Flash and pledge support for HTML 5 on the iPhone. Microsoft isn’t participating yet, but they’re betting on Silverlight.
I agree that Flash is here now and it works, but the topic is more about the future. Flash is well adopted because we all needed usable and that trumped everything else. Will it maintain traction once there are other options directly in the browsers? I don’t think so. It hasn’t hit the end of the road yet, but you can see it from here.
There are plenty of good Flash developers, but I don’t think you could find a single browser developer that doesn’t want to see it replaced. If you’re betting on the future of Flash, at least take a glance at who’s betting against it.
Visual Studio is like Photoshop or 3DS Max. The program is huge, bulky and very powerful. Once you become a power user of Visual Studio, you immediately notice all the things the other editors are lacking when you’re forced to use another IDE. Same goes for Photoshop and the big 3D packages. There’s stuff burried in Visual Studio that few people use but when you need it for that one hard to find bug, it’s a life saver.
@Rog: Eventually the Flash feature set will migrate out to the browser either from Adobe or from HTML5 or another effort. But for the next year at least – if not longer – the only viable way to get this sort of rich content out to 99% of the market is going to be with Adobe’s plugin.
Open standards are valuable, but the some of the best things to come to game development in the past five years have been closed source, closed standards developed by a single provider with a vested interest in games succeeding. (Microsoft’s work on DirectX and XBox 360, Nintendo on DS, and to some extent Adobe with Flash.)
Eventually I am sure I will be developing games directly against browser technology. I am worried it will be like cutting edge web dev now, where you have to make your code work against three or four implementations with subtle differences. But if that means I can get a game out in front of 99% of the market, it’s something I’ll have to deal with.