NxtGen Media - The Freeman View

Where to from Here?

June 29, 2009 on 12:43 pm | In Rich Internet Applications, flash, flex, games |

Great article on Jesse Warden’s blog , ‘Flash Player 11: Gaming Platform?’ There are lots of great (and needed) comments and discussion regarding this issue. I too have noticed industry Flash rock stars shifting focus to other platforms like the iPhone, or Unity. Makes me wonder if Adobe understands what is happening here.

I tried Unity. I loved it, but my money for the moment is made with the Flash platform. I pull the player penetration card, and stand on ‘when the Unity player has greater penetration, I’m in’. As for the iPhone, love the phenomenon, love what can be done with it, but loving the Flash platform more. That, and I don’t have an iPhone. Wife does though, she loves it, and is saying to me ‘hey, why don’t you make apps for the iPhone?’ Never has she cared about what platform I was coding for. Very telling indeed.

Flex was/is a wonderful paradigm shift for the Flash platform. I get it. RIAs are a huge deal, particularly for business apps, and the potential money that can be made is staggering. If everything really does move towards cloud computing, and RIAs become the way to go for apps, then it makes perfect sense for Adobe to concentrate on the business side of development rather than gaming. Or does it?

Back in the day, when Microsoft made most of its money off of corporate licenses, it made perfect sense for them to concentrate on business apps. Eventually, they saw the potential of gaming, and entered that arena first with DirectX, then later with Xbox. It took years for them to become a major player in those areas, but time was on their side. With the exponential growth of technology today, I don’t think that Adobe has the luxury of time that Microsoft had. There is a lot of potential here, and I hope Adobe is the one to address it. I hope they have been keeping a screaming demon of a player under raps and have been waiting for the right time to release it. Now would be a good time.

Making Flash The Console For The Web

-DCF