Open standards are valuable, but the some of the best things to come to game development in the past five years have been closed source, closed standards developed by a single provider with a vested interest in games succeeding. (Microsoft’s work on DirectX and XBox 360, Nintendo on DS, and to some extent Adobe with Flash.)

Eventually I am sure I will be developing games directly against browser technology. I am worried it will be like cutting edge web dev now, where you have to make your code work against three or four implementations with subtle differences. But if that means I can get a game out in front of 99% of the market, it’s something I’ll have to deal with.

Now that all of the major browsers are actively pursuing other solutions, Adobe’s opportunity is gone.

HTML 5 isn’t just some faceless committee effort. Browser developers from Apple, Google, Firefox and Opera are all involved. The codec argument is very apt, because for a change it isn’t just assumed they won’t settle on a baseline, they’re actually debating it. Things are moving that used to be static. Read the workgroup’s debate and you can see how it’s spurned new efforts and investments into pursuing the answers. Look at the HTML 5 spec itself, it’s so much more fleshed out now. Firefox 3.5 demonstrates much of it is usable. Webkit dev versions are getting advanced too.

There’s a strong push, especially from Google, to get a solution to video on the web that doesn’t involve Flash. Apple has chosen to shun Flash and pledge support for HTML 5 on the iPhone. Microsoft isn’t participating yet, but they’re betting on Silverlight.

I agree that Flash is here now and it works, but the topic is more about the future. Flash is well adopted because we all needed usable and that trumped everything else. Will it maintain traction once there are other options directly in the browsers? I don’t think so. It hasn’t hit the end of the road yet, but you can see it from here.

There are plenty of good Flash developers, but I don’t think you could find a single browser developer that doesn’t want to see it replaced. If you’re betting on the future of Flash, at least take a glance at who’s betting against it.

Visual Studio leaves me constantly wondering if Microsoft actually uses their own IDE. It always reminds me of that old song from the Muppet Movie that went, “I hope that somethin’ better comes along…”

Honestly, it’s not that closed. The compiler is open source, the VM is documented and open source. The SWF format is documented and can be legally used. There are several independent implementations at varying levels of quality (gameswf, RAD Game Tools’ G, Scaleform).

Also, it actually works and has a minimal tool chain.

Compare this to HTML5 which is suffering from design by committee, standards adoption issues, implementation compatibility, etc. Not that it couldn’t be just as good a platform, but Flash is here, it works right now, and Adobe is committed to making it good.

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/decoding-the-html-5-video-codec-debate.ars

Stuff like that keeps HTML 5 from becoming a standard so all we really have at the moment is Flash as a substitute vessel for rich media.

It’s not just a question of Adobe opening up, it’s a question of adoption. For mobile browsers especially, Flash doesn’t have traction. HTML 5 does, or at least Apple et al say they intend to follow the standard as much as possible.

BTW, Adobe has been opening stuff up to some degree: http://www.openscreenproject.org/about/faq.html

Flash is unfortunately a necessity for the time being, which is what probably made sites like YouTube so successful, and hopefully Metaplace of course. But to dominate the game market on the web would be like the travesty of depending on directx (over opengl) to make 3D desktop games.