The world changes, we know it, and companies and individuals who build products also know it. When you are faced with a shift in the trends, then you have to either adapt or are forced to do something else entirely, to start anew and abandon your projects.

Back in the early 2000s, we had a massive influx of video games, though they weren’t of the highest quality. They were browser games, of course. We played them, everyone played them, for that matter. However, they didn’t last very long and at some point, they were lost to time. 

What happened to the browser games? Are any still around, can they be played? Yes, they can be played, but there was a massive purge of browser games in the 2010s, and here is why.

Flash Giveth, Flash Taketh Away

Adobe Flash was a great tool, for a period of time. However, given that it was so easy to use and that everyone could actually make video games with it, it seemed too good to be true, and in the end, it was.

Flash had major flaws in its design and implementation. There are multiple ways that flash can be exploited to harm someone’s system. It was discovered in the 2000s and in the 2010s, browsers were already saying that you shouldn’t be using flash to view any content, and it would be disabled by default. But, this wasn’t the only problem that browser games faced, but it was a huge obstacle.

Flash Warnings Turned People Away

When you see a warning and a yellow message saying that you shouldn’t use flash, by any browser that you could download at the time, then you know that something is wrong with the product. While flash was used to power most of the internet’s content for a time, everyone was already shifting to HTML5 and in the 2010s, almost no one would be using flash to view clips, nor play games. 

Most browser games suffered because of this and none of the old ones were played for a longer period of time.

More Problems – Mobile Games

The 2010s changed the landscape for most users, because smartphones were introduced and getting more powerful, so that actual browser games were no longer necessary. Mobile games were all the hype and every developer and artist who knew a bit of coding and 2D or 3D digital art, moved to working on mobile games, simply because the mobile market was much more lucrative. This pushed browser games even further back, almost into oblivion.

Nostalgia, HTML5 and JS

Nostalgia hit some people and archive sites and projects like Flashpoint allow users to play flash games through emulation, safely. This means that the preserved flash games could still be played, in a browser, even.

HTML5 and Javascript are great languages for programming movable and interactable content for the web and browser games are still made, but through these languages. The process is not as easy, but the games are better, and safer.

Browser games are still around, even after their mass exodus by mobile games, they are just in a different package.