Thread by @larsiusprime

Okay can someone tell me why this old thread from last year is blowing up my mentions today? Did somebody big retweet it or embed it in an article or something?

https://twitter.com/TomFulp/status/1337543804283473920

I get it that Funkin is timely and big people are starting to take notice and we should have a full on Discourse probably starting next week about THE FUTURE OF GAMES IS A FLASH TO THE PAST (I probably need to get an article out on that speaking of...)

Ah what the hell here's a crappy tweet draft of my thoughts, for later articleification:

"Instant Games" as the nice fancy people are calling them, are an emerging niche that is as new as it is old as dirt, but this time might be different for interesting and boring reasons: 1/X

First, it's not new at all. We've had browser games since forever, but Flash got killed for good and HTML5 game features support in browsers has reached a critical mass of "good enough" and more crucially, there's non-sucky HTML5 game engines now

Friday Night Funkin has become the poster child for this and that's convenient for me because it uses the open source game engine I happen to contribute to, @HaxeFlixel. With this tech they can target native builds and HTML5 simultaneously

So they get Mac/Win/Linux targets, HTML5, and there is a Switch backend available that I personally maintain should @ninja_muffin99 decide to go that route.

So far this game is available on exactly two places: itch.io and @Newgrounds, and it's made millions

This despite the fact that the game is:
1) Free
2) Open Source
3) "A lot like a flash game"

Also the ways its succeeded have been very weird. Spotify of all things has been a big part of both its virality and its direct financial success, so I'm told.

It's hashtag on tiktok numbers in the billions, beating out even Undertale. It's super hot with the kids.

Even before it adopted my modding backend, Polymod, people were making source mods with this thing "the hard way" because hey, open source.

So there's two things to analyze here: Whatever crazy thing is happening with Funkin specifically, and whatever crazy trend may or may not be starting with "Instant Games" in general. A lot of ink has been spilled about Funkin specifically, let's talk about the future trends.

The easy way to write this story is "Flash games are BACK baby, but this time they're HTML5!"

Except the landscape could not be any more different than back in 2010.

Newgrounds is basically the last Flash portal. Kongregate is on life support but its core talent all left.

Flash portals worked back in the day in this weird ecosystem -- the absolute key was the games were FREE.

Flash was EVERYWHERE back then. You could send a game to someone just by sending a URL. Even on dial up connections, most would load zippy fast. Link, click, play. In 2006!

Nothing to install, nothing to download, nothing to pay, just you were instantly playing. This massively lower barrier to entry, combined with MUCH LOWER EXPECTATIONS, allowed an entirely different kind of content to proliferate than you see today -short form, aggressively weird.

Yes, you see "short form, aggressively weird" games on Itch, but the thing that's sometimes lost on people was we were making REAL MONEY back in the day. Everything from pizza & beer money to actual careers, especially if you lived in a low cost of living world.

And what drove that gravy train was sponsorships. You'd auction off the rights to have a flash portal put their logo on your game, then you'd put it out there and everybody would steal your SWF file and put it on their flash portal, exactly as you'd planned. FREE distribution.

Blah blah history lesson. What about today? Well the old flash game ad bubble burst. Steve Jobs came and broke our heart, mobile killed the Flashio star.

BUT. Antitrust looms over consolidated platforms. Devs are discontent with distribution and discovery.

Zoomers wanna click.

Also, streaming remote gameplay content is a thing. Cryptocurrency remains a red herring that everybody should ignore but will inevitably insert itself into the conversation anyways.

Also, the subscriptionularity is not near, it is HERE.
Substack, 15 movie/tv streaming services, Xbox game pass, the fact that dads in my neighborhood subscribe to freaking *car washes*.

The *technology* for "Instant Games" is here -- it's just browser games. Grab yourself HaxeFlixel or Godot or PixiJS or OpenFL or Heaps or Kha or whatever does the job

But the form the ECOSYSTEM will take has a lot to do with how and whether people make money.

So one option is a revival of the old sponsorship based model, which is ultimately backed by ads. I don't see this coming back for a bunch of reasons I'm not getting into now.

Another option is demos w/ upsells. Anecdotally this is exactly what a little Flash game by yours truly called Defender's Quest did at the height of the flash age, and we went on to do very well for ourselves. Steam demo festivals' popularity hint this might work in "instant"

Another option is subscriptions and you have platforms that build themselves around instant games. This is another thing that could back the sponsorship model. If you see a "Netflix of games" I think THIS is the format it would take -- shorter, weirder, more "flash gamey" games.

Another option is cryptocurrency bullshit and it will be a tremendous waste of everybody's time, money, and mother earth's precious bodily fluids

On subscriptions it can take two forms -- one is the platform model, which we've seen before. Expect to see a landgrab if this format takes off, followed by consolidation, etc.

The second form is the "substackification" of instant games. This is an evolution of "Back me on patreon and I'll make a bunch of weird stuff now and then". This can be viable for more bite-sized content, back in the Flash game heydey I called it the "Nerdook strategy..."

Nerdook was a flash game developer from... don't wanna say the country b/c I'll remember it wrong but I think somewhere in Southeast Asia. And Nerdook would put out games CONSTANTLY, all at a consistently high, but simple, level of quality.

If I'm not mistaken @EmilyG's twitter avatar to this day is a cameo of her from a Nerdook game. (I could be mistaken).

So under the "substackified" instant games model you would subscribe to e.g. Nerdook and devs like that would build a loyal following of instant game lovers.

Now here's the thing .... ALL the pieces for a "build your old business model" around this crazy idea are all just lying around. I'm not sure exactly what form this trend will take, if it is indeed a real trend at all and not just hype.

The other part of this I haven't explored is streaming services like Stadia / whatever Amazon's thing is I forget it's name.

That's more on the AAA space. Honestly I think Xbox Xcloud + Gamepass is going to end up owning that world. Red ocean fight incoming.

But instant games? That might be something new. Crucially, it's a way to go over the younger generation that might not have ever installed Steam and might not even own a PC.

Now let's talk about Apple, those filthy murderers of Flash.

I've followed the Epic trial with interest, and Apple's witnesses were really disingenuous about one thing: "Well for X you can just go to the browser and do it"

Yeah, except for the fact that Apple controls the browser engine. Firefox on iOS is limited to a reskin of Safari!

Mobile Safari is consistently behind the cutting edge of new web browser features, and this ain't not coincidence, because Apple knows if the browser gets cool enough you could just put games in it and do a full end run around the app store.

Luckily, Epic's lawsuit is shining a light on this, and antitrust forces are arrayed against Apple in the US and Europe. So we might get browser liberation on iOS sooner than we think.

And if we do, well then now we're in an interesting place. There ain't no easier way to share your game than a url you can send someone on their phone and then they click it and they're playing the game ON THEIR PHONE.

No, "wishlist this game on Steam", no, "remember to go to your PC later", no "download this app", not even "log in to this site."

Just here, play this game.

Messenger apps are going to start creating API's to integrate "instant games" directly into themselves, which may or may not work. That's actually old news, it started with Chinese messenger apps. Dunno if Discord has tried it yet or not.

Anyways things are gonna get weird who knows what will happen.

Anyways if you're a fancy person and you want to get into this space and know more about it, email me and I promise you I will aggressively bore you to death with my thoughts:
lars dot doucet at gmail dot com

Couple key follow up points:
LOWERED EXPECTATIONS is such a key thing.

On Steam it's hard to get someone to play your game until you first convince them it's worth at least $5 or $10. (And I know from running gamedatacrunch.com that those are the sticky price points)

Let me tell you what it is HARD to reach the $5/$10 "worth it" threshold.

But is your game worth a click? That's a much easier sell. Activation energy is the trick there, dial it all the way down to zero. Then follow up with whatever the eff you want.

I'm old and burnt out enough to be resistant to hype. This isn't going to be some utopia if it happens, it will just be different. But it will be a change and change means opportunity. So who are the potential winners and losers? (Knowing that this isn't zero-sum)

For one -- open source, web-native game engines have a natural advantage here. I don't see Unity and Unreal being able to participate in this space as easily as the Haxe and pure JS game engines.

For two -- I would not be surprised at all to see platforms like TikTok and Discord make a try at trying to bundle themselves into this. Expect Twitter and Facebook to wait to see someone else try something then shamelessly copy it.

I'm gonna say right now that people like me are gonna get real grumpy if you get rich off open source tech and don't give back (ideally by paying the developers who built all this stuff up over the past 10 years after the flash ecosystem got wrecked)

Funkin had the audacity to make their whole game Open Source and they're doing great and that breaks my mind in some beautiful ways

Anyways, the moral of this story is that the very *kinds* of games we make is indelibly connected to the ways we distribute and get paid to make them (or not).

Flash games birthed and cultivated entire genres that thrived in that weird spawning pool

What I loved about that ecosystem was rapidity of innovation. Honestly, "work on a game for 5 years and go broke" schtick is not a good thing. And even though part of that pathology is on the dev (looks in mirror), it's also on climbing over the escalating expectations threshold.

And I'm a realist, expectations will escalate even in an "instant games" world. We saw that in flash games for sure.

Who knows how it will turn out this time.

Another huge thing everyone misses was the fact that the old school flash game ecosystem was very collaborative.

I'll never forgive Steve Jobs for ditching the "bicycle of the mind" paradigm and instead bolting a a content-consumption funnel into your forehead instead

You saw this the most on @newgrounds -- and still do! and it's absolutely no coincidence that Newgrounds is the environment that specifically birthed Friday Night Funkin.

Newgrounds is like monks in A Canticle for Liebowitz -- keepers of the old knowledge in an age of oblivion.

Anyways I'm old and grumpy but I'm grateful that the kids are into dancing the charleston again so I can feel relevant