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Game Devs Predict Death of Flash, Installed Games

Posted by Soulskill on from the remember-when-browsers-just-browsed dept.

New submitter rescendent writes "In an interview with Massively, Illyriad Games developers Ben Adams and James Niesewand predict the death of Flash, the rise of HTML5, and a long-term shift away from installed games. Quoting: 'The major advantages that boxed set or download games have had over browser-based games are local storage and direct access to the graphics and audio engines. Those barriers are being smashed apart by HTML5. ... Especially for MMO game developers, I personally don't believe that developers have any real long-term choice about embarking on this path or not. Ultimately, I believe it's either browser-based or obsolescence. If you don't do it, your competitors will, and they'll be making games that work identically on more device platforms, on more browsers, on more operating systems. It's going to take a very long time to get there, though, but this change has begun now, and we firmly believe that HTML5 is the future.' With Microsoft joining the ranks of Apple and not supporting Flash in Windows 8, there's definitely a risk to Flash. But will browser-based games really replace installed games?"

8 of 295 comments (clear)

  1. Windows 8 by woodsbury · · Score: 5, Informative

    Microsoft has said that Windows 8 will support Flash, it will just be disabled if you view a page in the Metro UI. I can't imagine many people doing that beyond on a tablet like it is intended for.

  2. Few years or decades ? by zaibazu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Internet on the customer side needs to be several magnitutes faster to accomodate the same graphic fidelity

  3. No, it won't replace installed games. by BlueScreenO'Life · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Especially for MMO game developers

    About that part, yeah fair enough. And Flash games can't die soon enough. But that is one thing and another thing is to predict the death of "Installed Games". Look at the HTML5 version of Quake II - on an Atom netbook you get something like, 6fps? While the native runs smoothly on a 100 Mhz machine.

    1. Re:No, it won't replace installed games. by smelch · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Wow, you're right, in a distant future games of today will be streamable. But what about games of the distant future?

      --
      If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
  4. Not with our current tools by Tridus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Sorry, but you're not going to be able to replicate World of Warcraft in Javascript. It's not happening. Ever. The language just isn't built to do something that huge without collapsing under its own poor design decisions... not to mention minor details like needing to stream and locally cache several GB of textures and audio files.

    This only flies if you believe the future of "gaming" is what Flash games currently are: small, simple time wasters. For anything that's currently considered an AAA game, the idea that this stuff will replace it is a joke.

    --
    -- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
    1. Re:Not with our current tools by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      IAAPGD (I am a professional game developer), and I'd like to answer without the Slashdot-typical hate-spewing like in your example.

      There is a simple fact that will never change:

      A game written in compiled machine code, running on a big box, will always be able to offer more than (multi-)interpreted platforms. Let alone limited mobile ones.
      So those games will always be able to offer more bling, physics, enemy smartness, etc.
      But those are only two (aesthetics and technology) of the four parts that every game consists of. And they are factors. (They are multiplied with each other.)

      The other two are story of and gameplay (the essence of games).
      Which can mostly be done perfectly well even with a sheet of paper, a pencil and a couple of rocks. (But without the aesthetics and all the technology, immersion will be much harder to achieve.)

      And currently we have the situation, that big "game" companies have concentrated so much on the bling, that their output barely qualifies as games at all. While small independent developers rise up and do beautiful things with gameplay and story in the most limited environments. (Yes, like Flash.)
      This obligatory XKCD hits the nail on the head (but doesn't know the above reasons): http://xkcd.com/484/

      So actually, Flash will simply be replaced by XHTML5 with JS, WebGL, web sockets, SVG, etc. Because it offers more features (like real 3D, and standardized open formats/interfaces). And as a result, small independents without big budgets will use it.

      That's why think big companies abandoning the PC was the best thing that ever happened to the game "industry". May they go down with their locked-down consoles and Christmas tree ball games (shiny paper-thin outside, and hollow inside). While we fill the PCs with games that actually resonate with people and make them feel something again. (Tell me how you feel when you finished "The Company Of Myself", or when you are about to enter the water after having been to Saturn in "Dolphin Olympics". Or just when hearing an audio log in good old System Shock. :)

      Oh, and the only reason they don't want installed games, is because they are part of the organized crime that invented the lie of "intellectual property" for their protection racket. We independents are not part of this. In fact we found out that we make more money and gain more respect, by staying in reality (software, by the laws of physics, is not a product and can not be sold, owned or stolen. Software development is a service.) and being nice to our clients.

      Who would have thought? ^^

  5. Shannon would like to have a word with you by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 5, Informative

    This idea that somehow there'll be a magical technology that will allow for super fast wireless everywhere has no real foundation in reality. The reason is that pesky thing, Shannon's law: C = B * log2 (1+ S/N). What the means is the total bits per second you are going to get C, is dependent on the bandwidth in hertz, B, of the channel and it's signal-to-noise ratio, S/N. To get more data you have to either increase SNR or increase bandwidth.

    Well, in a wired world, this isn't that hard to do. Just increase the frequency. Ultimately going optical does a great job. When you are talking light waves which are in the hundreds of terahertz, well getting a channel that is a THz wide is perfectly possible. Even SNR can be improved to an extent, if needed, with better shielding, more power, and so on. What's more, every wire (or fiber) is its own, dedicated, channel. So a wire going to you and one going to me share nothing. We each get all the bandwidth.

    Not so in the world of wireless. There are hard limits on SNR because of ambient noise, and limits on transmission power and that whole inverse square law. You can't very well have mobile devices with 1000 watt transmitters, not if you want things on battery, never mind the other problems.

    Bandwidth is perhaps even a bigger problem. The thing is, different frequency ranges have different properties. Something like 60GHz might sound great for having a wide channel, but it gets attenuated by air, never mind walls. The low frequencies punch through better, but you end up with a more narrow channel. If you are operating in the 700MHz range you aren't having a 1GHz channel.

    Then of course everyone in a given area has to share the bandwidth. Whatever you have available on a channel, everyone using it shares it. 100mbps doesn't sound so impressive if 50 people are all sharing it.

    These things are why the latest and greatest Wireless N struggles to push 200mbps effective data rate, single duplex, under the best conditions yet gigabit ethernet is cheap as hell and has been available for around 2 decades.

    Whatever we can do with wires, wireless will always be much slower. As a practical matter, long(ish) range wireless like LTE and so on are never going to be all that blazingly fast, particularly when everyone is using them heavily. Building out networks and cutting down segment size helps, as do new technologies, but you aren't going to see wireless in the same arena as wired.

  6. How to persuade M$ to sign such a browser? by tepples · · Score: 5, Informative

    You can install another browser that does support plug-ins

    No, Microsoft can install another browser on your device through the Metro app store and has every right to decline to do so, just as Apple has declined to approve browsers that run on an iOS device other than its own Safari. Did you miss the recent story that all Metro style applications must be digitally signed by Microsoft?