Emanuele Feronato

Talking about Flash and Game development.

I am receiving every day, for at least one year, emails or messages from Flash developers worried about the future of Flash as a game development platform.

I always say there’s no need to worry about it for at least another couple of years, because I firmly believe in it, and finally an official note from Adobe seems to confirm what I am saying.

This picture recaps Flash and gaming situation:

And for the laziest of you who just want some play text statistics:

* 3 billions hour per week (that’s 342,466 years!!) are spent playing games globally.

* 80% of App Store revenue goes to mobile games.

* 98 million americans (1 in 3 people online) play social/casual games.

* Table owners spend 67% of their time playing games.

* Gaming industry is two times bigger than music industry.

* 1.3 billion computers (four times U.S. population – five times Playstation + Xbox + Wii units) have Flash Player installed

* 96% of the top games on Facebook are built on Flash technology

* 500 million iPhone, iPad and Android devices can install games built with Flash technology via app stores, as Adobe Air lets developers package games built with Flash for iOS and Android, with native hardware accelerated performance.

* More than two million people are playing Zombie-Jombie, powered by HTML5 + Adobe Phonegap Build

* 1.7 billion desktops + mobile devices can use Flash technology for GPU accelerated gaming

* 40 million people play Farmville 2 every month, powered by Stage3D

* Kabam social game revenue in 2012 was $180 million.

* $70 million monthly revenue comes from 9 top chinese games using Flash technology.

* The most successful Facebook game in 2012 was Songpop, powered by Flash for iOS and Android.

I’d personally suggest to continue studying AS3 for the next years.