In 2016, Adobe announced that they would stop developing Flash. By December 2020, Flash will no longer be supported by any web browser. As many of you know, most of Plarium’s strategy games run on the Flash engine. If the browsers block Flash, it would spell the end of an incredible gaming community. It would be a disaster, and we’re not about to let it happen.
Adobe suggested we transfer our games from Flash to WebGL to avoid the problem entirely. As an experiment, we began to transfer one of our games - Sparta: War of Empires - to WebGL in the middle of 2016.
It took 2 years, and the results were disappointing. The WebGL engine was not as powerful as Flash: the minimum system requirements went up, the visual quality went down, the load times were 5-7 times longer, and the game was much less responsive. After 3 years of awesome gameplay, players had come to expect more. WebGL would not do!
Our top priority was, and will always be, the development of high-quality games for our players. WebGL was unacceptable, so we built an alternative: Plarium Play, an independent desktop application. It enables us to safely and reliably use Flash even after Adobe stops supporting the engine. It’s convenient for you, it’s convenient for us, and it’s already the solution being implemented by others facing this problem.
What does this mean?
Chrome will support Flash till the end of 2020. We recommend switching to Chrome if your browser cuts support early.