Canvas/WebGL may replace Flash to end users. I'm not aware of creator tools that allow people to put things together as easily as they could using Flash.

Adobe Animate is literally Flash, except it uses standard web technologies like Canvas, JS and WebGL. What's not to like?

Literally everything about animate. It is hugely bloated and awful to use and crash prone. It takes upwards of 30 seconds to save a file. It has two different kinds of tween to support backwards compatibility. And the "HTML" export is a garbage fire. Flash used a form of vector graphics that were incompatible with svgs.

Adobe has been trying to maintain backwards compatibility with flash (because most studios were still using the last version macromedia put out over 10 years ago) So adobe animate was always doomed to try and please everyone and end up pissing everyone off.

It's also nowhere near as easy to distribute these games compared to Flash. All you needed with Flash was the swf and as long as you had a flash player then it would work.

What? Everyone these days has a browser. How is it more difficult to share a web game than sharing a flash game? IF anything, back then you often had to install macromedia and other plugins since they didn't always come by default on every computer.

Discovery. Discovery. Discovery. Sure you can host it on your personal site but who is gonna find it? It has to be on a 3rd party website and that 3rd party website wants some way to monetize it (by showing ads). It's harder to manage many files than one file that a VM can run as is. Also Flash had something like 98-99% installation base during like 2000-2010 so it was very much not a problem. Flash had a much larger market share than any one browser.

The reason discovery is down isn't because they're hard to find, it's because there's much more interesting "entertainment" on the web these days, such as Youtube, Netflix, Reddit, and other time sinks. Back in the days, Flash games and geocities were the only forms of entertainment, which is why they were so big. Nowadays, we've got amazing free content and games everywhere, which is why this kind of entertainment isn't as sought after anymore. It's not lack of discovery, it's lack of demand.

> web as a whole has grown up and changed

eh, no it hasnt, and even if it did it would have nothing to do with flash. Flash was a great domain-specific tool for somthing that is significantly more cumbersome to write (and difficult to debug, and less wysiwyg) in canvas. Plus technology is supposed to move forward and 20 years is a geologic timespan in internet years. We expected to have much, much better tools by now, not a barely equivalent

Again, the issue isn't the lack of tools. It's the lack of interest. Making games is easier than ever with Unity, yet people don't spend all day playing random small Unity games. We have limited time, and as the types of entertainment increase, we have less and less to spend on small silly things like Flash games.

Back then, a Flash game was the epitome of web entertainment. Now, we have thousands of amazing Youtube videos, Netflix originals, memes, and so on. If you were to give people the same flash games now, they'd find them ridiculously lame.

Unity is not a particularly lightweight thing, and flash wasn't just for games. Its main use was animations / banners and video .

> If you were to give people the same flash games now, they'd find them ridiculously lame.

Some of the most popular social games are like farmville, or some poker games. those are really equivalent of flash

Farmville and Candy Crush were literally flash games. Also many genres like physics games were born from flash.

On Unity I agree. It's never going to have 50kb games that download and start instantly. It's also not particularly easy or good for working with 2D games. I've used both professionally.

> were literally flash games

thats exactly why i mention them . i meant to say their current html versions are equivalent of their previous flash

Unity also does animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8NeB10INDo

But it gets really pedantic arguing the semantics of web flash - fundamentally it was only showing on a web page because you installed the browser plugin or it. Today browsers might have stopped supporting arbitrary library plugins like that but now you can write them in webassembly for the same ends. Its just that nobody has actually gone and done it yet.

try to imagine a web page with 3 Unity banners

Except no one plays Farmville anymore, and as Candycrush implied, most flash games were replaced by mobile games. My point was that people are finding their entertainment elsewhere (mobile, youtube, reddit), which is the real cause of Flash's demise (and similar content).

Unity impose hardware constraints that are difficult to overcome in poorer places too. I have an old Dell at home and I won't even try to install Unity on it because it struggles to Windows 10. It's a perfect fine machine for coding with a simple Linux distro.

>Just like we don't have as many fun quirky geocities-like websites. The issue isn't the lack of Flash, it's that the web as a whole has grown up and changed.

We have tons of memes uploaded each day, with crude animations, that could have been 10x easier with flash...