I’m sympathetic to the “Why does everything have to require a fucking login?”
But come on. So many of those games were just inferior reskins of classics. If you want to play Pac-Man, then play Pac-Man. You don’t need to go to Lays.com and play Cheeto Crunchers, where a giant Chester Cheetah floating head chases snack foods through a maze.
My website has a game on it still lol
link?
For me, it’s the fact that every god damned program I want to use requires a fucking subscription.
Shout out to fucking Blender and GIMP and InkScape. They’re really keeping shit cool.
So sick of this “pay to play” structure we now have on EVERYTHING.
I miss Kitten Cannon so much lmao, and Madness Interactive, and addictinggames . com (which iirc died so probably don’t visit and yes the website was mispelled).
I remember seeing that game with the hammer and pot and not believing it was a flash game and that people paid for it.
Robot Unicorn Attack was my shit.
Am I misremembering or would corporate websites randomly have branded flash games
We got a free, breakfast-themed Doom total conversion .wad in boxes of Chex. Truly a golden age.
ChexQuest marked humanity’s peak
I remember script based marketting gimmicks like a percy jackson bolt thag would delete elements off a website
wtf happened to all the random fun gimmicks popping up, prob mobile browser support issuss
Generally speaking, giving javascript that much control over your browser was a security hazard.
But also, firms used to have much larger staffs. It wasn’t just two marketing guys in a trench coat trying to tell you they were a $10B company.
I’m pretty sure it’s specifically the battery life of mobile devices that’s the issue.
I loved their Dexter’s lab Flash game back in the days. CN and Nick lost their charm
To an extent this still exist, but instead of flash games its not html5 games
I’ve been inside a few big companies and I’ve seen exactly how it works.
In order to manage huge organisations, they divide them all up into cost centers. And the website is considered marketing so it gets given a budget on the theory that it brings customers. It uses the budget to make games and it does indeed bring customers.
Then a few years later, the shareholders are asking why their stock hasn’t outperformed the market, and they put in a CEO tasked with fixing it, and the CEO asks the head of the department in charge of websites what can he do to address the fact that his department is losing money instead of making it.
While this is a nice theory, even with traditional marketing like print and tv ads, it’s always going to cost the company money.
For sure. But it’s a harder sell internally to say: This game is generating revenue.
With a print ad you might say: This magazine has x monthly readers, so that is the impressions we get and it’s rather obvious how that might give you more sales.
With the game, you might have some visitor numbers as well, but if that is translating to sales is hard to prove. Additionally, they are already on your website.
You might have to do a survey of your clients or during the order process and ask them “how did you find out about us?” or something like that. And only if enough people say “I bought something from you, because of the game on your website”, will you be able to justify the expense of maintaining it.
Itch.io game devs unite! There’s still hope. I miss Ebaumsworld, New grounds and Miniclip too but I think there a small part of the Internet that still has this charm.
Here’s my game dev contribution:
Did anybody else play Kids Next Door Fusion Fall?
I mean all those in browser games required shockwave, flash, or java which basically was malware but we didn’t know better then
The Ed Edd and Eddy game where you used machine puzzle pieces to put a jawbraker into a bucket was my game as a kid.
There was also a beavis and butthead game somewhere where you hocked a loogie at people from a rooftop lol
Yeah, I miss it in some ways, too. It was more of the Wild West of internet.
I would argue today’s internet is fully optimized for control over people (when desired) & profitability. Unless there’s some Earth-shattering backlash where idk people kill all ads & they purchase NOTHING online unless they very specifically search for it…this is the internet, perfected. The internet is free, our attention & wallets are the product. Traded, tracked, bought, and sold.
It used to be a whole weird wide world. Then the corpos got a hold of it, and now it’s 5 giant spyware websites filled with screenshots of the other 4. Say what you will about the old web (NO HTTPS!) but at least it was human.
I grew up in the wild west of the internet and I do miss it. Things were so much more interesting, but that was probably becuase I was a kid and the internet was new, so having all this content was not usual.
People were happier. There was still hope back then.
