Hi guys, so ever since the year 2012, there has been a great decline of web games on all hosting sites like Armor Games, Newgrounds and Congregate.
By decline I mean less and less games produced, the quality also lower.
There are still many talented and creative game makers, but they seem to have forsaken web games.
Many high quality flash games that are comparable to a non-AAA Steam game had been produced in the past 2-3 decades. Yet by no means does the end of Flash mark the death of web games, as it had been dead a few years before the official end of Flash. It is very pitiful to see the immense source of fun in childhood came to a dead end.
Many people attribute the dead of web games to the shift to mobile games. While it is true that the mobile game market has risen enormously, I struggle to believe that mobile games can replace web games. In terms of morals and attractiveness, mobile games are full of microtransactions. Every scene contains a twerking plus icon asking you to buy more gems with real money. Something that was nonexistent back in the golden days of Flash/web games, except a few that tried to implement microtransactions. It was mostly a free entertainment for people to express their creativity and freedom without feeling intense greed from the developers. In terms of interface, mobile games lack the level of control a web game with a mouse can provide. Using a mouse can let a player accurately place certain objects in the game to a precise control, while using thick slippery fingers on a small phone screen is not going to give the same level of manipulation. In terms of content, many web games had great story and abundant progression. Usually not any worse than mobile games.
All in all, I personally find web games still have a unique position in the gaming and its death cannot be simply explained by the rise of mobile games, especially when no rigid statistics have been presented to support such causation.
Recently, I see Armor Games have more games coming out. And they are not those MMOs full of microtransactions and have a default high rating pushed by Armor Games. They are the games of creativity made by independent developers. They are now mostly using HTML, I guess it is due to more and more people being adept at using HTML as time progresses. It will then be easier to output web games. The frequency of occurrence of such games has reached about 2 games per week, which is a healthy amount compared to the previous 1 game per 2 weeks when web games are really in the dead phase.
I look forward to more html games made by independent developers, and the rise of web games once again.
What do you guys think?
As much as I'd like for it to not be the case, I'd still say web games are a dying breed. In the 2010s almost every game had around 100.000 plays. Nowadays, there are, what, 30k per game?
The main reason people played web games is that they were free and wouldn't require a long download time. Perhaps also because you could play them in a school computer lab. Well, mobile games have all of those advantages *and* they're portable. Everyone has their phone with them at all times.
As for "morals and attractiveness", you might be forgetting Zynga games. Actually, pretty much all of the games you used to be able to play on Facebook. Constantly asking you to spare a few gems or beg your friends to click on your notifications in order to earn cow. There are still mobile games that are quite like that, and IMO, they're equally as accessible as those flash games were. Massive money-grab games were *very* visible. Nothing much has changed.
Personally, I dislike phones. I think they give a worse experience than your computer (that also applies to consoles to a lesser point.) That's why any games I do finish will probably end up being online rather than on mobile.
