I built a tiny, kinda crappy multiplayer web game a few years ago (https://manygolf.club/), and while it's mostly dead now, it was relatively popular with 5-15 active players at any time for a few months (I know, small potatoes, but as someone who had never made a game played by _anyone_ outside of friends and family before, it was cool to see).

I noticed one of my biggest traffic referrers appeared to be from some kind of school proxy, and the most common Google suggestion for "manygolf" was "manygolf unblocked", so I imagine it is a lot of bored kids with locked-down devices. I also still get an occasional email every now and then from a "game portal" site that wants to license my game in some way, so I guess that stuff is still a market unto itself.

Anecdotally: flash games got a LOT of plays because of that play style.

I was a kid at the time, and released a few crappy flash games (“Tilt” where you literally just had to balance a plate on your cursor).

Over 5 years it go something like 100million plays... I never quite believed it.

This past weekend I uploaded a small game to Kongregate. It's been played 1000 times in the last 24 hours. I'd say the community is still surprisingly alive! Also, if I had uploaded the same game with zero marketing to mobile, I'd have expected zero downloads.

https://www.kongregate.com/games/Frenchie14/factions

thats awesome! what technology are people using these days to make "flash" games?

There's a lot of options! I use Unity3D. For 2D games, I'd recommend something with a more native web build.

My daughter was super excited to find a game website that had just cloned a lot of games from the play store because it worked in the browser and I had adblock on so it was like magic to her, not having to watch an ad every 30 seconds. Like when I was a kid video games were ad-free and TV was the source of ads but its the opposite for a lot of kids growing up these days.

You also had to buy those games.. the shareware titles were five bucks. I never asked my mom or dad to fork up for the additional episodes either

Google got into HTML 5 games a little while ago with Game Snacks. Here is a blog post with about it.

https://www.blog.google/technology/area-120/gamesnacks-bring...