Adobe tried to kill my friend

I’m a bit late to this topic, but better late than never.

Recently Adobe attempted to quietly kill off Adobe Animate / Flash. They sent out emails to Flash users explaining that the software would soon become unavailable to new Creative Cloud members. Existing subscribers would still have access for another 12 months.

Then came the worrying part. The email was poorly worded, but the message sounded something like:

After that period, the program will stop opening entirely, we’re locking you out! You won’t be able to launch.exe – bitches… so you’d better export all your Flash assets into other formats while you still can.

If memory serves me correctly, I believe they signed the letter off with: Fuck you very much, Adobe... It was a complete shit show.

Before I continue to spiel, let’s get some terms down:
Flash is an Adobe product (like Photoshop) used to create animation and interactive content. It’s now officially called Animate. I’ll use these terms interchangeably. Flash Player is the player that plays Flash / Animate content. Think of it as an video player, but for flash content. Or think of it as a Browser Plugin that lets your browser play flash content. Adobe has already killed the Flash Player in 2020. You may have heard about this.

Animators across the internet revolted. Social media lit up with complaints, outrage, and general disbelief. In a strange way, it was actually nice to see Flash back in the spotlight again – even if it was for the wrong reasons. For myself, I wasn’t surprised to hear this news… but I was still angry! Flash is love, and they tried to kill love – a crime against humanity.

For animation studios, this kind of decision would be a disaster. A huge number of productions still rely on Animate. You might think the solution is simple: people could just crack the software and keep using it. And yes, individuals probably would.

But businesses don’t operate that way.

Studios, institutions and corporations can’t legally rely on pirated tools. Losing legitimate access to Animate would mean losing access to decades of production files. And that’s catastrophic. Studios constantly revisit old files – to make corrections, re-render shots at higher resolution, extract assets for marketing, or reuse animation in future episodes.

For game development the situation is even worse. Imagine if all of your art assets were built in Flash and suddenly accessing those files became legally impossible. Games currently in development would be stuck. Even shipped games would be affected – you couldn’t fix art issues, update content, or produce DLC.

Imagine if I couldn’t legally update Rearmed! (I know I haven’t patched it in years…but still!) Fortunately the backlash worked. After the community revolt, Adobe walked the decision back. Flash, or rather Animate, is safe for now. That somewhat reduces the dramatic impact of what I’m about to say, but I’m declaring it anyway:

I’m continuing to use Flash.

Recently I’ve been rethinking my approach to game development, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I want to make Flash games again.

I already built a small client project recently called Forward Finance Game: The Approval Rush. Anyone who knows me knows I come from the Flash animation and development community. Flash was always the tool that let me create quickly.

> You can check out Forward Finance Game: The Approval Rush here.

Since then I’ve learned modern engines. I can build games in Unity, Godot, and various Haxe frameworks. And let’s be honest – they’re better tools. Flash is old, slow, and limited. Modern engines are far more powerful and far more performant.

But here’s the thing.

Flash is fast.

Not fast at runtime, its runtime is still complete dog shit… but fast to build with. For small or experimental projects, the speed of creation is incredible. Take the art pipeline for example. I’ve been developing Throw Rocks At Shit for Nintendo Switch in Unity. It’s a very simple lane-shooter, but I’m pushing it to a high level of quality and polish. Achieving that in Unity requires a relatively big pipeline for a small team.

Look at these workflows for comparison:

Do you see the difference? And that’s not even the full pipeline on the Unity side.

Yes, the final results with modern tools are superior. Unity lets me build beautiful visuals, complex shaders, and far more optimized systems than Flash’s ancient vector renderer ever could. But Flash’s limitations can also be a strength. They force you to keep things simple instead of disappearing down endless engineering rabbit holes.

So Adobe, whether you like it or not:

You cannot stop me.

I’m going to keep using Flash. In fact, I’ve already started developing a new Flash game. I’m not entirely sure what it is yet, but the prototype is already proving interesting. I’ll be writing more about it over the coming weeks.

I’ll end this post with a message to Adobe:

Dear Adobe,

Stop being shit. Keep developing Animate. Flash is my best friend and you tried to kill it. I only have so tolerance for those who try to kill my friends.

Hire some developers who actually care about the product. Animate is worth building on. It’s a powerful piece of software with decades of history behind it.

Yes, Flash Player is gone. The web has moved on to HTML5 and modern runtimes… Fine! Then build a new runtime. Give us ActionScript 4 or Integrate Haxe. Improve the animation tools. Modernize the renderer.

Just do something, you fucking losers. Everyone hates you. Do something good ffs it’s not hard. Because Animate could still be an incredible platform — if someone at Adobe actually gave a fuck. But I know you don’t… so ultimately, fuck you.

Yours truly,

Daniel Sun