The complete run

Everything, listed

Thirteen pieces in four sections. The front page carries an edit of this; the whole thing is here.

The day the plugin stopped

Flash ended, and what went with it.

• 01The day the plugin stoppedAdobe 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.
• 02Two projects, and neither of them was anybody's jobRuffle and the Flashpoint archive were volunteer efforts that preserved what a commercial decision had ended.
• 03What a runtime actually wasFlash was a plugin executing its own bytecode, which is why nothing in the browser could simply take over from it.

What replaced it

Canvas, WebGL and WebAssembly.

• 01Canvas, WebGL, and then WebAssemblyThe replacements are native browser features rather than a plugin, which changed the performance ceiling and the distribution model at once.
• 02Why the portal model died with itFlash portals aggregated thousands of small games; nothing in the native stack reproduced that distribution.
• 03The games that came back, and the ones that did notEmulation restored a large share of the archive; the ones that depended on a live server did not come back at all.

Worlds that never close

Persistent servers and their economies.

• 01Worlds that never close, and the rent on themA persistent world is a running cost with no natural end, which is the single fact that shapes every business model around it.
• 02The server economyVirtual economies have inflation, sinks and faucets, and studios employ economists to manage them.
• 03What happens when it shutsA sunset announcement, a final day, and a world that cannot be archived because it only existed as a running process.

Somebody has to pay for the server

Free-to-play, and where the odds are published.

• 01Somebody has to pay for the serverFree-to-play is not a discount but a different accounting: acquisition is free and revenue comes from a small fraction of players.
• 02The Korean invoiceThe model arrived from Asia, where broadband penetration and PC cafés made subscription unworkable and item sales obvious.
• 03What a battle pass actually isA time-boxed reward track that converts engagement into a purchase decision, and it replaced the subscription for structural reasons.
• 04Where the odds have to be publishedSeveral jurisdictions now require loot box probabilities to be disclosed, which is a documented regulatory response with dates.