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Comment by azhenley | Hacker News Reader

Flash was an amazing, low barrier way to make games that could be distributed with almost no effort. In a single weekend I was able to make a game, do all the art, integrate a video advertisement API into it, and release it to hundreds of websites. I made tens of thousands of dollars doing this from my dorm while going to school and working two jobs. I have yet to find an alternative that can come anywhere close to this.

I wrote a bit about this on my blog, if you'd like to know more: http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/8lessons8games.html

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I grew up drawing Flash animations in high school just as a hobby. I probably did hundreds of short animations over the years, things like the popular Stick Fight animations.

To this day I've never found any drawing/animation tool I'm comfortable with, which means I rarely draw anymore which means my drawing skills are getting worse which means I draw even less.

I'm not sure how much of that is just the realities of getting older vs the actual change in tooling, but it's definitely fuel for some nostalgia.

> I have yet to find an alternative that can come anywhere close to this.

It wasn't the technology, it was the economy. In the late 90's consumer internet uptake was growing literally exponentially, but the population of hackers who could provide content was lagging terribly.

I mean, obviously Flash was probably the best option for that particular niche, but if it didn't exist something else would have happened.

And yet no one has built anything like it since. No one has even built a tool that’s has as low a barrier to entry for either of creating animations or making games, never mind one with both that low barrier to entry and no upper limit to the quality of what you can make with it.

> And yet no one has built anything like it since.

Because it's not the technology, it's the economy! You can't build another Flash, because no such product could exist. We're awash with talented content generation for the connected modern society. There's no niche for hacker students to fill, with any tool.

It was the technology. It was the drag and drop IDE. HTML5 is not a replacement because it doesn't have the drag and drop element.

Same with me, Flash games were an amazing side business for a college kid. I made over a dozen games and paid for college completely :)

How were you monetizing it?

Not GP, but there was a huge economy around banner / ads being embedded in Flash games, and those games being shared widely / distributed on many different sites.

There were many "portal" sites that showed (hosted) many games and showed ads alongside or before the games started, and then a second sub-ecosystem of ads embedded in the games themselves by the game developers.

Instead of feeling like their games were "pirated" when somebody copied the game's .swf file, developers had this (viral) mechanism which made those games lucrative wherever they'd appear on the web!

Source: know someone who ran one of those "portal" sites and made an absolute killing.

I had a portal like that as a teen (GameGum.com) before they blew up (once people started selling the “one click all in one arcade scripts” it was all over, even though ours was far nicer and had a nice community).

Made good money for a few years and bought my first car off it!

Ads through a network like CPMStar were the majority, averaged about $0.50 per thousand views. At the time there was also a flash game marketplace at fgl.com, that let game portals like Addicting Games or Newgrounds bid to "sponsor" your game which involved adding their branding and links to their site. On my most popular game I made $100k over a few years.

There are still lots of such portals with Flash and HTML5 games - so is that economy still thriving well?

I did two games for fun when I was younger. I only made 200$ in total, but they were made in less than 4 hours each (I did them both in a math class, thus why the time restriction). To monetize them, I used MochiMedia, which sadly died with Flash, and they were the one that distributed them. I got about half a millions views on both of them, mostly from China (which had an ecpm of 1 cent too :')).

I have a good friend who's passion projects were flash games. He went to conferences, would send over samples, and honestly they were good. I think it made him a better programmer than me too.

The hate against flash is warranted in the contexts the hate originates, but there is a niche where it belongs.

Flash is the Delphi of the web. It was trivial to code a complex native GUI app in Delphi 7 with VCL, and now it's effectively gone, not quite replaced by Qt with its overcomplicated C++ nature.

Off topic: if possible, can you please share more details/materials about your course - COSC 493: CPU Emulation?

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