Discontinuation of Adobe Flash Player

After 25 years, Adobe has killed their Flash Player for good.

Adobe Flash Player is a discontinued computer software used for a lot of animations and games. Flash Player, alongside a programming language called ActionScript, was used for games such as Papa's Pizzeria, Club Penguin, Nitrome games, and many more. On April 29, 2010, an open letter from Steve Jobs was published criticizing Adobe Flash Player not being supported on Apple's iOS operating systems like the iPhone and iPad due to poor performances on mobile devices and battery consumption. Apple didn't want their devices to be on a third-party company and because of that Adobe ended up ending Flash Player on mobile web browsers in November 2011.

On October 28th, 2014, HTML5 started functioning very similar to Flash Player but without installing a plug in, and it was also used for animations and games just like Flash. It was also the time that Adobe rebranded Adobe Flash Professional to Adobe Animate after the short-lived Edge Suite (lasted for 3 years) which was a HTML5 developmental kit. Because of HTML5, Flash has started to decline, and in July 2017, Adobe announced that they will end support for Flash for good by the end of 2020. The announcement was then coordinated with major web browsers such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox.

The last version of Flash Player is 32.0.0.465, which was released by Adobe on December 8, 2020.

Why The Discontinuation Sucks

It caused many great Flash games to become unplayable.
It also caused MMO Flash games such as Neopets, Marapets and Club Penguin Private Servers to be shut down. Though some game have downloadable versions due to this.
There are still many game portal websites that still have their games in Flash and are unable to migrate them to HTML5. For example, Facebook's FarmVille had shut down after 10 years due to Flash.
You can't use a different web browser to play Flash games since all browsers ended support for Flash, unless your browser is REALLY old (like the older versions of Internet Explorer).
Due to Flash's shutdown, the popular site Pogo.com has retired great games like Pogo Bowl.
Adobe refused to keep it supported after 2020 because they keep insisting people to transfer over to HTML5.
There is no way to play Flash games after 2020 due to many of them being too old to migrate.
It's impossible to directly port Flash games to HTML5, so most games must be re-created from scratch.
Adobe had the guts to actually include a timebomb on recent versions of Flash Player, which locks up usage of Flash content past January 12, 2021. The timebomb also affects using Flash Player offline, making it impossible to even use Flash past that date. Thankfully, there is a way to stop Flash Player from updating automatically, but it is too late now.
On January 12, 2021, all Flash content has become unplayable, and you are now greeted with an icon that tells you about Flash's end of life.
- It also made the Newgrounds Player unable to play Flash games, since it was still using Flash to run them, though someone seems to have found a work-around.
- Thankfully though, Flashpoint still works and has not been affected.
- The Chrome OS version of Chrome still allowed you to use Flash Player until in February 2021 that Chrome disabled it.
- Even if there is a game website that uses Ruffle, some of them are broken since Ruffle doesn't support Action Script 2.0, and some of the games suffer from bugs and glitches. In Raft Wars for example, some versions of the game crash in the first level. But in some versions of the game, it is mostly playable (despite the enemies transforming to others, and the viking shield on some enemies randomly appear) until it randomly crashes and the tennis balls you shoot end up in the up-left corner on the screen.
This even caused some older printers to be rendered unusable due to their interface being created in Flash.
- This also caused a Chinese railroad station to shutdown because they were operated with Flash.

Redeeming Qualities

BlueMaxima's Flashpoint project is working to preserve many Flash games and animations so that people can play and view Flash content after 2020. Plus, The Internet Archive is doing a similar goal.
You can in theory use older versions of Internet Explorer or other old browsers and use an old version of Windows like Windows XP to play Flash games after 2020, though it is recommended you use a virtual machine for these and not on an actual computer as old browsers and operating systems tend to have security holes.
Some games are getting non-flash remakes via being ported to JavaScript or external applications, such as Happy Wheels, Pogo Bowl, and the entirety of Ninja Kiwi's game library (which has been ported to Steam under the name "Ninja Kiwi Archive").
The removal of Flash Player is at the very least justified for security and performance reasons, as the usage of Flash plugins prompts the generation of a shared library file (for example, .dll), which can be exploited by hackers to inject malware or initiate malicious activities. However, others have pointed out that most of these security issues were actually fixed years ago, rendering this reason nearly mood.
Some game portal sites are able to port some flash games to HTML5 like Poki.
You can also use alternative software other than Flash Player after 2020, Ruffle and Lightspark for example. Even better, both are open-source and can be played offline on your computer AND your mobile device. The caveat however, is that they might not be 100% compatible.
An app called Flash Patcher allows you to remove the time bomb on Flash Player, combined with Waterfox, one of the few regularly updated browsers that still supports Flash, and you can now play any Flash game in 2021.
Browsers like Basilisk and Puffin retained support for Flash.