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By Craig Robinson
The tech industry has been calling for the death of Flash for years. Last year, the quiet rumblings calling for its demise turned into roars as the likes of Chrome and Firefox began to phase out support. A full-on war has been waged against Flash technology and much of the casual games industry is stuck on the losing side.
The latest example of a game to succumb in the fight is from Disney, which shuttered the Club Penguin desktop experience earlier this year. While Disney did launch a new mobile version that seems to be getting some traction, Club Penguin is a game that an entire generation grew up playing and has remained a cultural zeitgeist for millennials everywhere even to this day.
That said, Disney’s motivation to shut down the core Club Penguin desktop experience was understandable, at least at a technical level. At FlowPlay, we were in a similar situation last year with our flagship MMO, Vegas World. We had an aging code base built in ActionScript, the Flash-exclusive programming language. We had millions of players playing our Flash games on the web and we well understood Flash would soon be going away due to lack of support from Adobe and concerted efforts by the tech community at large to move consumers away from the platform. We were also increasingly aware of the larger shift to mobile.
Despite Disney’s justification that completely scrapping the desktop experience was necessary in order to launch a new mobile experience, both supporting the old game while still innovating on mobile was entirely possible. I know because we recently did so, and did so with significantly fewer financial and engineering resources than Disney has at its disposal.
Here’s how.
The tech industry has been calling for the death of Flash for years. Last year, the quiet rumblings calling for its demise turned into roars as the likes of Chrome and Firefox began to phase out support. A full-on war has been waged against Flash technology and much of the casual games industry is stuck on the losing side.
The latest example of a game to succumb in the fight is from Disney, which shuttered the Club Penguin desktop experience earlier this year. While Disney did launch a new mobile version that seems to be getting some traction, Club Penguin is a game that an entire generation grew up playing and has remained a cultural zeitgeist for millennials everywhere even to this day.
That said, Disney’s motivation to shut down the core Club Penguin desktop experience was understandable, at least at a technical level. At FlowPlay, we were in a similar situation last year with our flagship MMO, Vegas World. We had an aging code base built in ActionScript, the Flash-exclusive programming language. We had millions of players playing our Flash games on the web and we well understood Flash would soon be going away due to lack of support from Adobe and concerted efforts by the tech community at large to move consumers away from the platform. We were also increasingly aware of the larger shift to mobile.
Despite Disney’s justification that completely scrapping the desktop experience was necessary in order to launch a new mobile experience, both supporting the old game while still innovating on mobile was entirely possible. I know because we recently did so, and did so with significantly fewer financial and engineering resources than Disney has at its disposal.
Here’s how.
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