Unity Technologies Blog » Blog Archive » Sunsetting Flash

Just like you guys, we sometimes have to make difficult decisions about which platforms to target. For us, doing so often involves speculating about what the fast-changing gaming environment will look like in what is effectively the dim yet not so distant future. Sometimes, things don’t work out as we expected.

As of today, we will stop selling Flash deployment licenses.  We will continue to support our existing Flash customers throughout the 4.x cycle.

When we started working on a Flash deployment add-on some 18 months ago we had high hopes for the future of Flash as a gaming platform. The performance of early builds was promising, and Adobe seemed to be dedicated to making it a success. Since then much has changed.

We don’t see Adobe being firmly committed to the future development of Flash. This is evidenced by the cancellation of Flash Player Next, the instability of recent Flash Player versions and by Adobe’s workforce moving on to work on other projects. By introducing, and then abandoning, a revenue sharing model, Adobe eroded developers’ (and our) trust in Flash as a dependable, continuously improving platform. Developers are moving away from Flash, and while Flash publishing has gotten little traction, our own Unity Web Player has seen unprecedented growth in recent months (now installed on over 200M computers and already installed by 1/3 of all Facebook gamers).

We know that some of you have, like us, invested heavily in targeting Flash. We will do all we can to support you. We will keep the current Flash deployment feature set functioning throughout the Unity 4.x cycle, and will include bug fixes made in upcoming Unity 4.x iterations. We do not plan, however, to make further significant investments in deployment to the platform.

We encourage license holders who have questions or concerns about Flash deployment to contact us directly at support@unity3d.com or contact their account manager.

Getting your Unity content on the Web: What the future holds

Though we are phasing out Flash deployment, Unity will continue to break new ground when it comes to bringing high-end content to the Web.

Uptake of the Unity Web Player is growing exponentially, and, given its increasing popularity amongst Facebook gamers and new Facebook-friendly features, we expect this trend to continue over the coming year. All Unity users can publish content to the Web Player.

Work is also underway behind the scenes on an exciting new Unity web publishing initiative that we can’t wait to tell you about. We’ll be providing more details of this soon.