Miniclip to Discontinue Desktop Site and Transition Exclusively to Mobile Games | Hacker News Reader

Miniclip to Discontinue Desktop Site and Transition Exclusively to Mobile Games

miniclip.com

182 pointstech234a127 comments

It's really a shame that Adobe's absolute garbage treatment of Flash ended up causing, in my opinion, roughly a decade and a half or so of young childrens' and teens' disinterest in making video games. That niche was somewhat filled partly by Roblox and Minecraft, and today it's getting easier and easier to spin something up in Unity, but there's never been anything quite comparable to the level of simplicity of just making some bullshit in Fireworks and fiddling around with Flash for a few hours while recording audio on a shitty microphone and splicing up old pictures to make a dumb joke. Ah nostalgia

On one hand, I kinda stand by being against flash, but on the other hand, we aren't really at a better place today than when Flash was all over the place.

I just wish someone had made a good Flash/ActionScript3 -> JS+HTML-Canvas compiler. There's no reason we couldn't have kept the authoring tools just because we got rid of runtime and all its security issues.

We now have Ruffle which does more or less what Adobe should have done 10 years ago.

https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle

If Adobe had seen their ban from the iPhone as a challenge to make Flash player capable of running without a plug-in they would dominate so many areas today. Flex would have become a viable platform to develop web apps/PWAs with - effectively sitting in the same position as what Flutter is doing today (Although I don’t believe Flutter is a one size fits all universal toolkit). I suppose they tried with PhoneGap but without Flash/Flex, which was their super power, they just didn’t have enough value proposition.

I suspect they saw the desktop install base of Flash Player as too important to risk loosing by marking it redundant - innovator's dilemma.

For some reason they just excepted defeat with Flash.

What about authoring tools? Part of what made flash popular was the photoshop effect.

Ruffle is pretty bad what what I've seen so far. It's not there yet.

Mozilla actually had a really impressive one about 5 years ago... but it was shutdown by Adobe lawyers.

The runtime has too much baggage, and Adobe is it’s own worst enemy to keep AnimateCc alive. Instead I would prefer someone rebuild a subset of the authoring tool that sufficiently captures the essence of Flash, with multi-platform targets (including WebGL). I say rebuild Macromedia Flash 5, but with a JavaScript coding environment, and you would have a successful product.

>multi-platform targets

I think WebAssembly is the most natural fit here.

WebAssembly is not a platform.

Yeah thanks.

Perhaps I’m remembering things incorrectly, but wasn’t Flash the source of a large number of drive-by malware installs, which are much rarer today with modern browsers?

The runtime was definitely a consistent security problem. But the games, animations, etc. people made with Flash did really enrich the internet, I’d say. And Adobe Flash was a powerful tool with a relatively easy entry point for beginners and non-programmers.

Nowadays they will install a WebAssembly module or use your GPU instead.

WebAssembly’s sandbox is quite a bit stronger than Flash’s was though.

No need to escape the sandbox to abuse the users computer, or reach out to possible secrets, if they happen to go through exported functions.

For sure. But one of the bigger issues with flash was it’s runtime being a constant source of RCEs

Now you get to enjoy them as JIT CVEs.

Though from my understanding, there is far less of them, they're harder to do, and easier to solve.

And even if it's the same amount, having a sandbox that's harder to escape, holding everything else equal, seems like a win for end-users.

Flash's demise, while it caused me no end of grief back in the day as it was the bulk of my income, was a good thing in the end.

Flash did not went away, thanks to the wonders of WebAssembly.

https://leaningtech.com/cheerpx-for-flash/

May I ask how have you been monetizing Flash up to that point?

I remember reading examples from an e-book on how to build 3D scenes with Flex 3 when I was 17-18 years old. It was a short lived dream of mine to create online video games. Instead, I ended-up making add-ons for PHP-based forums.

During that era Unity had its own web browser plugin and there was at least one Tennis-like game on the miniclip site itself.

I owned and ran a web design agency, but because of my skills in Flash a lot of our "value add" was doing impressive experiences/interactive showcases for our various clients. A lot of it was doing kiosk deployment work, which I think is still done today with Flash sometimes.

Crypto miners don't need to escape a sandbox

Easy solution, don't leave random webgames running when you're done with them, and if it doesn't noticeably impact performance...?

You don't need a game for that, any website will do, specially with background workers.

Exactly!

Who's checking for this stuff on every blog page open, actually? I wish I was, but, usually am not.

Modern browsers will flag and slow down tabs that abuse the cpu. You could probably still mine but it’s a slow drip.

What is the reason why Java and Flash runtimes were somehow more prone to malware but JS seems fine? Is it some specific sandboxing technology or something else entirely?

All three runtimes are/were regularly compromised, so there’s no fundamental difference between them.

Flash suffered from not having a spec other than its implementation. Made it hard to fix bugs while being backwards compatible

We definitely are. Flash websites were super common at all levels; Now you rarely get the over-the-top website with zero accessibility, they’re more expensive.

I’m not counting ad tech and the various user-hostile websites because they’d have happened in Flash too (rather, Flash ads were already a thing too)

I think the over-the-top interactive sites died off partially because of that but also because it really is a terrible experience in mobile. And mobile web became so important.

Wasn't Fireworks paid? How would a random teen create a game in it?

The secret ingredient is crime.

More specifically, street bazaars or a friend from a friend on the school playground.

Progz, crackz, and warez.

Not GP but we were taught to use it in ICT lessons. Could've used it in any lesson/break/after school where computers were available if I'd been so inclined.

> How would a random teen create a game in it?

Create an Adobe (or, back then, Macromedia - memory is a bit hazy there) account, download the trial of whatever you wanted, download a keygen off of eDonkey or Pirate Bay, run the keygen in some VM so it would not dump some virus on your actual machine, blacklist a boatload of Adobe/Macromedia domains, done.

Mute your computer because the otherwise non-malicious keygen is going to blast some chiptune at max volume for no reason.

Nah, it's got a reason. Celebrate the names of the people who brought you this toy, have a little tiny rave with them for a moment. Say "hey thanks, The Ma$ked Fucker, I'm gonna have some fun with this tool."

I don't see what's wrong with that. Most keygen groups back in the day put some serious effort in their music and artwork.

I seem to recall just installing the trials and then setting my computer’s clock back every couple weeks.

Many school computers also had Macromedia installed, which is how I got into animation and my first forays into web development.

>run the keygen in some VM

lol.

You just downloaded a cracked version from whatever torrent site showed up on google or yahoo search and it 'just worked'. No account creation. No VMs. No Blacklisting. :)

I used some of my savings from my part time job to buy the student version of flash, then earned the money back getting paid to make websites for people.

I was a kid who tried to teach myself to make flash games and I couldnt figure it out. I had lessons in Fireworks at school and could make gifs, but Flash I could not understand. I couldnt find good tutorials online either.

It's way easier for a kid to make a game in Godot today than it ever was in Flash.

Also, Godot games run great in the browser. I dont think your general thesis holds up. Way more games are made by young people today than at any point in history.

>Flash I could not understand. I couldnt find good tutorials online either.

You were probably trying to learn in the late AS2 or AS3 era. The tutorials all became too high level and driven by Flash dev ideas of grown up processes that sure are what you want for building professional work but all raised the roof and the floor at the same time cutting off what was the entry point for teenagers to start creating in Flash.

Earlier days there were great resources for getting started.

I'd also put Roblox in there as well. It absorbed many (IMO) of the minigame creation efforts from Minecraft, FPS mods, and RTS games. Nowadays, probably bigger than all 3 combined (I know one is a game, one is a classification of communities, and the latter is an entire genre), though I only have my own guesses and no hard data to go off of.

It's really easy to write simple games with the canvas element. I recognize it lacks a lot of the WYSIWYG tooling flash had but you don't need frameworks.

End of the day the people at the top of Adobe only really saw Flash as owning the web video delivery mechanism.

Also it was pretty disgusting how little effort they put into optimization until it threatened them being on iOS. I was knee deep in working with Flash and suddenly one day all the code was running as fast on Mac as it did on Windows. After years of it usually being 30% slower.

> It's really a shame that Adobe's absolute garbage treatment of Flash

People praised Steve Jobs' decision that the iPhone shall have no support for Flash, and evangelized that Flash shall be dead - the future shall be HTML5.

Everybody who said something else was treated as an Adobe shill.

All points that Jobs made against Flash were correct, as Adobe had really dropped the ball on Flash.

After that it was too late, and Adobe killed flash only two years after Jobs' letter.

I don't blame Adobe. They tried, but it was the avalanche of negativity (some of it warranted) from all corners of tech that sealed the fate of Flash.

What was and is surprising is that when Flash went away it killed Web-based gaming. Capability wise HTML/JS/CSS can replicate anything that Flash could do.. and yet, the scene is still dead.

Doesn't surprise me at all. The platform upon which the entire web game community was based just disappeared, and "Oh don't worry, here's a radically different stack with much worse tooling that you can learn to use to continue your low-paying passion-driven job as a web game dev" is a pretty bad pitch. So the artists just left.

Because learning Flash was easier than learning HTML5. The tools and scripting were incredibly easy. No one has made a good easy-to-use HTML5 editor. As complex as Unity can get, it's a better option than learning HTML5 these days. I hope one day a powerful low-friction successor to Flash will appear.

I would say that Flash was artist-oriented, while HTML5 is programmer-oriented.

Man, I'm so sad to hear this. Miniclip was the absolute best and I've had so much fun on the site going all the way back more than 14 years where I loved playing all those flash games. I remember having a ton of fun with some of the sidescrolling shoot-'em-ups that had a surprising degree of polish

My favorite developers to come from that era was Nitrome[0]. They made so many classics like Skywire, Final Ninja and Cheese Dreams. They're still making games and have ported a large number of their Flash games to HTML5 to play on the browser. They're now making a Shovel Knight spinoff which was a pleasant surprise

https://www.nitrome.com/

Nitrome was the best! I especially loved their Steamlands game. You build these tanks to fight pirate tanks in a steampunk England.

http://www.nitrome.com/games/steamlandsplayerpack/

Ho this is sad. One of my favorite game was motherload (https://www.miniclip.com/games/motherload) before Minecraft was a thing.

And this is what really got me into programming, I created a clone (https://github.com/Sytten/MineDeeper) in C++ when I was in high school in 2012 (I even did fancy smart pointer stuff before it was cool). See https://www.developpez.net/forums/d1276790-2/applications/de... for a screenshot in desktop mode.

I made friends on this French dev community that even became IRL friends and that I later visited when I visited France.

So many memories, farewell!

In case you miss it that much, you can now get non-flash Motherload on Steam (Super Motherload includes both the sequel and a full clone of the original game):

https://store.steampowered.com/app/269110/Super_Motherload/

I love that game too! Such a great game, that little game even has a final boss! I sent miniclip a mail in 2012 asking for how to start programming and developing games and they replied! i still have that email in my inbox. At that time i was in highschool too but didn't start programming or anything related until university lol.

That's a shame. Ever since the removal of Flash from Chrome I think it's been a downhill ride for web-based games. I used to love going through the catalog of quirky "minigames" if you will every now and then to pass time. On top of the decline of Flash Player, I think mobile games definitely hit the nail in the coffin for them.

Yeah :(

It's hard to find fun games that can be played in the browser nowadays. They definitely do exist, but there's no where near the variety that we used to have when Flash was still a thing.

I loved the days that Kongregate.com was thriving. Today, Armor Games is still up and running. It has quite some gems worth exploring: https://armorgames.com/games/rating#games

Armor Games has been porting classics to Steam. We've got Scriptwelder games and Crush the Castle.

My go-to for these types of games is itch.io. https://itch.io/games/html5

My experience with that is it usually never works, and for whatever reason the games never seem compelling. Not sure why, flash games never had that problem. They were always full games with rich graphics and often a story.

I literally tried to pull up itch while tablet shopping yesterday - the site never rendered on the tablets and the one game I tried about crashed the whole tablet. Audio/video worked fine. I'm sure if I sat down at a high powered beefy windows desktop maybe they'd work - I remember flash working great on 1GHz celeron processors with maybe 1 or 2 GB of memory and windows 95. Html games are still a bunch of nonsense, on average.

Some games can be iffy, but I haven't really had any major problems with the site. My computer is from 2015, so not exactly high-end.

You could also install the desktop client, then you can play all the games easily (including the non-web-based ones).

I'm partial to this one: https://leef6010.itch.io/projectkat

I just pulled up "Farmers Stealing Tanks" on my BlackBerry KeyOne and played for a minute. It was playable (though not perfect), and that's on a 5 year old phone with a chipset that emphasized battery life over performance.

Interestingly, it appears a great many of those are unity games and won't run on phones.

Newgrounds is still alive and kicking. They’ve even ported all their Flash games to be playable on modern devices to boot!

That said, I’m not going to pretend like I go there frequently either. I just don’t have time to blow on popcorn experiences anymore.

I'm certainly not an expert but I think you're comparing apples and oranges a little.

Js and canvas is a code execution environment, but Flash had a polished authoring environment which I believe made it easier for less-technical people to get stuff happening.

Unfortunately, it's hard to find fun games on mobile as well. Mobiles games are an utter disgrace nowadays. Can you even call them games? They're an optimised engagement loop with some gameplay in between the "buy platinum coins" and "spin to win" popups.

Google decided to, and successfully, killed a whole software system. In hindsight, what was the reason, and was it justified?

Let's be honest here: what killed Flash was years of neglect by Adobe. Google removing it from Chrome was a downstream effect, not a cause.

Yeah, I'm old enough to remember how absolutely fucking garbage Flash was, and the source of many a web-based malware that haunted many a Windows user. I don't really blame Apple's decision not to support it. There's no way Jobs would've allowed such a disease prone plugin infesting his new platform.

Are you sure it's any better? Last time I've used a JS heavy site the UX was just utterly awful. Flash had bad bits to be sure but it could be snappy. I had hope we could do better but a lot of sites seem as bad or worse on arguably better hardware.

I'm not sure the tech stack was ever to blame...people would have eventually fixed the bad parts of flash.

> Last time I've used a JS heavy site the UX was just utterly awful.

That's an issue with the web site, not the underlying technology.

> […] people would have eventually fixed the bad parts of flash.

The Flash plugin was a closed-source component. (Various attempts were made at open-source substitutes, but none ever reached a fully usable state.) The only people who could have "fixed the bad parts of Flash" were Adobe employees, and they didn't.

Isn't there a bit of an anachronism in your post? I thought the end of flash support happened before his death.

It was Apple that decided Flash's fate, ever since Steve Jobs refused to support it on the most important end-user platform, like, ever.

Which is funny, because for years Flash only ever ran well on Mac OS 9 in Internet Explorer 5. Any other browser/OS combo and you were looking at dropped frames, and/or audio that couldn't keep in sync with the video. It really was a tool for designers, and accordingly Mac OS was the platform that got the most love.

It’s funny because after his first comments about it’s performance being the reason Adobe magically fixed it in about 6 weeks and we finally had close performance parity with windows after years of Adobe saying it’s not possible.

Anything that damages Adobe’s bottom line is completely justified.

The amount of tech they’ve squandered or mismanaged or just plain destroyed is disgusting.

And over the last 10 years of being a monopoly they’ve just let their software rot and now it’s so janky to use, photoshop even freezes for 4 seconds when switching between selection tools these days.

At this point in time. In what way was Flash superior to JavaScript and canvas?

There was even SWF player implementations in JavaScript at this point in time.

Somehow, I don't think the death of Flash had much to do with it. Rather, the app ecosystem replaced a space that, that for a limited time, was occupied by Flash based web stuff.

There's nothing as good and as easy as Flash was to create 2D games. It was wysiwyg. Even kids could do it.

Is there authoring/creation tooling anywhere near what Flash had?

I made Flash stuff when I was a lot younger and it was insanely straight forward thanks to the tooling. I haven’t tried to animate anything since… 2007 perhaps? Does JS or canvas have a similar experience to author content?

Depends on what you need. For simple stuff Wrick Editor[0] might be good enough.

[0] https://www.wickeditor.com/

Tumult Hype: a Mac application that uses a graphical timeline UI to manipulate CSS and JSS for animation, and includes a physics engine to simulate collisions, bounces and things needed for game design. Exports to HTML, GIF and MP4.

https://tumult.com/hype/

Authoring tools.

Former Flash game developer here. A big part of it was artists and coders could use the same tool. An artist could create some flash animations and then I as a coder would go in and hook up all the code to make it functional without having to spend any extra effort to make the graphics or animation work (in other platforms you'd have to pack sprite sheets, color encoding, sometimes fight memory (at least I did on iPhone 4 back in the day), and then you'd have to set up all the animations manually and get each one working.

With Flash I was just sent an FLA, browsed through all the animations, went "awesome", and started setting up hitboxes and dropping them into the game.

Like I've wanted to port some of my Flash games to HTML5, but the intense frame by frame animation would be a bear to export and hook up in other formats.

And non-frame-by-frame animation was easy enough that I could help fill in the gaps when needed, no big deal. I even made a few simple animations just for the hell of it back then since it was so easy to work with.

I eventually migrated to console dev with XNA, then mobile dev with iOS, then some 3D development with Unity, and I've dabbled with Monogame, Phaser, Java, Pico-8, PlayDate, Unreal Engine, and currently working on a game in Unity again, since it's pretty much your only choice right now besides Unreal if you want good VR support. But yeah, nothing I've worked with has felt quite as nice as Flash as far as synergy between art and code, especially 2D art.

Examples:

I teamed up with an artist to make a 7 character head to head fighting game: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/187047

I teamed up with another artist to make a richly animated (espcially the boss) short platformer.: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/116067

Did a lot of Flash back in the day myself. The workflow was nice. Simpler times but surely you could roll your own framework today that did all these things in a similar fashion? There's nothing about the web today preventing this...

If there was a demand, game developers would find a way. It’s just that kids are playing games on phones these days.

I think it was mostly mobile games. Why make games for small amounts of money when you can make actual money on the app store. The decline was happening even before Flash was removed from chrome.

Pouring one out for miniclip.com. For the countless hours of fun, covertly playing flash games in my high school computer lab when the teacher wasn't looking. Legend.

Boom boom volleyball was the best

Even fifteen years on, I ocasionally remember the cheat code “GETEMOUT” for BBV.

Heli Attack 3 was dope. So were the nitrome games. And of course Club Penguin and Runescape.

I will not, like others, cry over Miniclip because the truth is that I have looked there maybe twice in the last 5 years. But for sure I would also like to pay my respects and thank you for the time I could spend having fun there several years ago.

I agree. A lot of comments here are in past tense: “Miniclip was…”, “the games were…”, “I loved…”, “they used to…”

You can reminisce the good times but you can’t be sad they’re transitioning when their core audience (including me) haven’t visited the website in almost 10 years.

It's a shame that they can't transition it to a read-only archive type site, where everything is still accessible and playable- jut no new updates or content.

What would it take to do something like this?

Literally nothing? Just leave it as is. There is a browser extension called Ruffle that lets you play older (AS2) Flash games, and eventually it will support newer (AS3) Flash games too.

Edit: most users won't have the Ruffle extension, so the one great thing they could do is add it to the site with a single <script> tag :)

False. Bandwidth and hosting and keeping site working is not nothing.

As long as they're breakeven keep it running? I guess that also takes employees and not many are interested in just maintaining a website

I never heard of the site until now, how hard would it be to convert it to static?

Flash games are static content (except for high scores). A Flash game is just a SWF file, typically a couple MB (or KB!).

If you'd like to experience the games that were available on Miniclip back in the day, your best bet is FlashPoint, a big offline archive of Flash games (ships with integrated FlashPlayer and a nice UI to search for games).

https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/

Someone’s already been working on it.

https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/

That's what kongregate did I believe. They disabled the forums, the chats, no new games, no new achievements and that's it. It's a strange sensation to enter kongregate which had such a thriving community and see everything so... static

For those of you who haven't heard of it, there is a project to archive and preserve all browser-based games and their respective runners. See https://github.com/FlashpointProject

I might be the weirdo, but I never fully bought into the mobile gaming market. It's very rare that I'm not close to a computer and I have the opportunity/inclination to play video games.

You're not a weirdo here on HN, most of us probably have desktop/laptop computers. However, for the majority of the global population, they only have a mobile device as their computer. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/

I checked your link because the claim seemed improbable to me. Here is what I found:

- 77% US adults currently own a desktop/laptop computer (interestingly, this seems to hold mostly steady since 2008)

- 85% US adults own smartphones

There is no "only own a smartphone category" in the data. There is a "relies on their smartphone for internet access, with no broadband internet". This one is just 15% of adults, though slightly higher in the 18-29 age group.

I can't see anything in that link that would support the majority of people using only a mobile device.

I think the link is bad evidence, but they mentioned the "global population," which makes the claim more reasonable.

Wrong link my mistake, US has high usage of desktop/laptop but in most other parts of the world smartphone is primary device. https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mob...

Here is a fantastic archive of old flash and other proprietary browser plugins games, short clips, and other content.

https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/

Instead of mourning Adobe Flash, you could also head over to https://itch.io/games/html5 . Browser games aren't going anywhere.

So many creative and interesting games and animations were hosted on sites like this and Newgrounds. I spent so much time on these sites growing up that they shaped my interests, hobbies and gave me a sense of community. It's sad to see these parts of the internet slowly disappear and I'm glad Newgrounds is still able to harbor a niche community for now.

Miniclip, Armorgames, Kongregate were my childhood. I guess this is the end of an era.

Is there an article or announcement here? On my phone it just takes me to their App Store page.

It's a banner on the desktop website. They link a FAQ that goes into more detail: https://support.miniclip.com/hc/en-us/articles/5091169897617

This should have been the link, not the app store link that informs nothing.

The link points to their homepage, though the site might behave differently on mobile.

This is really sad. Since everyone is doing it, here are some of my favorite games:

1. Snow Line (I still play this around Christmas every year)

2. Dream Racer

3. Bloxorz

4. Bubble Trouble

EDIT: Also, did anyone else here use the avatar-builder that Miniclip had? Oh man, this is so sad.

I loved Miniclip in the late 2000s. Their UX went downhill after that.

So long friend...

Web-based?

I am happy to see Tencent-owned Miniclip die. Hope their mobile games will face similar fate, and that moral companies will take their place.

Miniclip sucked. It was all about Addicting Games and XGenStudios.

But the inferior Miniclip game selection (for normies) made me appreciate the other flash sites more. Miniclip was reliable though. It was a nice era. I feel bittersweet about this.

Kongregate was my main site. Every game had a chatbox so there was a lot of community building. And it was really built around creators as well, allowing any user to submit a game. As a result there was a ton of exclusive content there

It's probably second only to Newgrounds in terms of driving a creator-centric vision of flash gaming/art

Armor Games caught on to a little bit later

It's bringing back lots of memories looking through the XGenStudios catalog [1]. I remember playing Motherload when I was in middle school, around the time it was released (2005). It was a neat game, but was really difficult, with games lasting multiple days, a couple hours per day.

I replayed it a couple years ago and was done in about 3 hours. I see they have Super Motherload, released in 2013. I may have to check it out.

[1] http://www.xgenstudios.com/games/

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