FEATURE: More than a Flash in the pan?

Ever since games development became a respectable career option, cubicle-constrained games programmers began pining for a return to the good old days of short projects, rampant creativity, easy distribution and informal working practices. Oh, and very little prospect of getting paid for all their hard work. (We never said the programmers were logical to pine).

While the conventional games industry has thrown such dogged dreams the odd bone – early 1990s shareware distribution, turn-of-the-century mobile game start-ups, and, latterly, Xbox Live Arcade – browser-based Flash games have sprung up almost unnoticed to offer exactly what those old-timers felt they’d lost. Indeed some veterans, such as ex-Bullfrog Productions coder Sean Cooper, have publicly turned their back on conventional games development to seek their fortune, or at least a living wage, from Flash games.

While Flash games are played by millions every day, the money they generate – overwhelmingly from advertising and sponsorship – is still dwarfed by conventional gaming. But that games are created at all using Flash would have surprised those watching its emergence in the mid-1990s. Flash has its roots in a graphics creation package, and when Macromedia acquired the technology in late 1996 it was focussed on bringing animation, not games, to the rapidly expanding World Wide Web.

Over a decade and nine major updates later, Flash games programmers still complain that the focus by present owner Adobe remains on animation. Yet this slow evolution is arguably what’s enabled Flash to flourish as a games platform. Since the earliest Flash games began being collated and distributed, sites such as Miniclip and Newsgrounds featuring amateur games have flourished alongside more commercial, ad-orientated sites like Wrigley’s pioneering Candystand. Slow advances in Flash’s capabilities have helped ensure talented bedroom coders have always been able to match anything the professionals could offer.

On the one hand, this low barrier to entry has enabled thousands of bedroom games developers to experience the thrill of seeing their games being played and enjoyed around the world. Credible, innovative games have emerged over the years, too, with the programmers behind games like Samorost, Fancy Pants and those offered at Orisinal.com able to explore artistic directions that would be deemed commercial suicide in the conventional games market. New design ideas can spread rapidly thanks to Flash games’ short development times, too. On the other hand, the market has always been swamped with me-too titles and lacklustre advergames, which makes finding gems unlikely for the average Web surfer who’s often cited as the typical Flash gamer.

Still, for all the dross some remarkable games have emerged from the Flash scene, and some such as Bejewelled, Alien Hominid and Line Rider have even transitioned to full-commercial development after proving themselves in the browser. But the new commercial impetus has been driven more by the emergence of portals such as Kongregate that share advertising revenue with games developers, and more recently by growing sponsorship possibilities, partly thanks to match-making services such as FlashGameLicense.com. Successful commercial Flash-based projects such as Disney’s Club Penguin have also attracted more attention – and money – to the Flash format.

FLASH FLOODING
“The audience for Flash games has been big for many years, but I think larger companies are just starting to realize how big it is,” says Jim Greer, CEO of Kongregate, the self-styled YouTube of Flash games that pioneered revenue sharing when it launched in late 2006.

“Developers have more options to make money from their games from portals like ours or ad networks like MochiAds, though the dollar figures are still relatively small.”

Despite such increasing fortunes, Greer estimates that there are still probably only a dozen or so Kongregate developers who make a living from their games, not counting those also engaged in work-for-hire, such as advergames.

“We're working hard to add more options for these developers, building a premium ad sales team and a micro-transactions platform,” Greer says. “Outside Kongregate, we've definitely seen the prices for sponsoring games go way up, partly due to a more open market.”

Paul Preece is one of the new breed of Flash developers; he only began working with Flash technology some 18-months ago. The huge success of his debut game, Desktop Tower Defence, saw him quit his day job to pursue opportunities in Flash games full-time.

“The sophistication of Flash games has improved a lot as more experienced developers start recognising Flash as a good platform for making games,” Preece believes. “The normal Flash mini-game is still around in their hundreds, but larger scale games are becoming more prevalent, and more polished.”

Instances of conventional games developers jumping over to work with Flash are still rare – the aforementioned Sean Cooper, who now pays his bills with his Boxhead shooter, is an oft-quoted example – which some put down to the ongoing limits of Flash from a games perspective.

“As a gaming platform, the Flash player has not really made great strides in recent years,” admits Greer. “There have been some improvements in rendering speed but nothing revolutionary. Adobe has understandably been working on the enterprise, desktop, and mobile markets more than gaming.”

Greer adds that it will be interesting to see whether competition from Silverlight, a competitive offering from Microsoft, will spur Adobe into action.

So far, the changes have been slight. The ActionScript language at the heart of Flash was upgraded to ActionScript 3 a couple of years ago, which helped speed games up, but there are higher hopes for the next upgrade –Adobe Flash CS4 – which is set to add more games-friendly improvements such as inverse kinematics, 3D capabilities, and peer-to-peer networking. Others hope for an updated Flash development environment that puts more focus on coding rather than animation.

THE FUTURE OF FLASH
“It's weird, but I actually see the Flash games market in the same position as the late ‘80s home video game market,” says Paul Preece. “We've had the garage-built home grown explosion and now we are seeing small teams producing higher quality games.”

“I see a lot of money going into casual games this year, most of which is aimed at virtual worlds or casual game portals,” he continues. “All of the new casual game portals – and all the existing ones – that I know of, supply Flash-based games. The demand is pushing up sponsorship prices and enabling better games to be developed.”

Preece estimates that a good coder who can turnaround games in two months can earn $10K-$20K a month in sponsorship. The games do not have to be large but they do have to be polished, fun and have some depth to the gameplay.

“The non-sponsorship route of distributing your own games and running advertising on your site and/or using pre-roll advertising is viable but much harder to achieve,” Preece warns. “Right now, the money is in sponsorship and advergaming.”

Will these new commercial opportunities mean the end of the DIY Flash scene? Jim Greer doesn’t think so. “I think the passionate amateur will always be a huge part of browser-based gaming,” he says. “People will always be looking for something new and innovative, and in browser-based games big brands and development budgets don't matter as much as they do on a console.”

For as long as the games remain 2D rather than 3D, the production values, and thus team sizes, should be constrained, keeping costs down and ensuring new entrants can put their hat in the ring. More importantly, for the foreseeable future Flash will offer what small developers can’t easily achieve on console and handheld formats – distribution.

And there’s another advantage in this world far from console manufacturers with new boxes to peddle. Because the Flash player is installed on so many PCs worldwide (and increasingly on other platforms, too), any programmer that demands ownership of a high-spec device for their game to run risks losing a large chunk of the audience.

“The graphical arms race is slowed down,” concludes Paul Preece.

True. But the monetary one is surely just beginning.