2MJEUX
A player at a CRT monitor in an unlit room, three-quarter profile, screen light doing all the work

The game was free. The accounting was not.

The day the plugin stopped

The day the plugin stopped

Adobe ended Flash support on 31 December 2020 and the runtime was removed from every major browser, taking an enormous body of work offline at once.

Studios we keep tabs on

Games and makers our coverage grows beside.

Studios and platforms whose work these articles circle back to, again and again.

And the roll behind them

Somebody has to pay for the server

Free at the door. Priced inside.

Free-to-play is not a discount. It is a different set of books: acquisition costs the player nothing and the revenue arrives from a small fraction of the people playing.

01The Korean invoiceThe model arrived from Asia, where broadband penetration and PC cafés made subscription unworkable and item sales obvious. 02What a battle pass actually isA time-boxed reward track that converts engagement into a purchase decision, and it replaced the subscription for structural reasons. 03Where the odds have to be publishedSeveral jurisdictions now require loot box probabilities to be disclosed, which is a documented regulatory response with dates.
A phone in a hand showing a store interface, room lit
Free at the door, priced inside. The store is the part of the design that had to be got right.
31·12·2020 31·12·2020

The last day the runtime ran. Twelve days later the player itself began refusing to open the files.

The day the plugin stopped

Two projects, and neither of them was anybody's job

Ruffle and the Flashpoint archive were volunteer efforts that preserved what a commercial decision had ended.

Ruffle reimplements the player. Flashpoint keeps the files and the player that opened them.

Read the piece

Object. Canvas.
WebGL. WebAssembly.

Four ways the browser has been asked to draw a game. Each one faster than the last, and each one further from anything you can keep by saving a file. What replaced it →

Worlds that never close

Worlds that never close, and the rent on them

A persistent world is a running cost with no natural end, which is the single fact that shapes every business model around it. Studios employ economists to keep the currency from running away — the faucets, the sinks and the tax are all deliberate.

A plotted economic graph on a large wall screen

Studios run these curves the way a central bank does — the currency is issued, taxed and destroyed on purpose.

Everything, listed

Thirteen pieces, four sections, no dates on any of it.

The complete run lives on one page, and every section keeps its own. Open the full list →