Plarium's plans for its strategy games once browsers stop supporting Flash
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.
Players who are currently playing on plarium.com should switch directly to Plarium Play as soon as possible.
Players who are using facebook.com should switch to Facebook’s Gameroom application.
Other social platforms hosting our games are currently developing desktop applications. Once those are out, you should switch over.
While Flash is available on browsers, we will do everything we can to help you play our games on your format of choice. Once that’s no longer an option, you can still keep playing on Plarium Play or your platform’s desktop application.
We want to assure you that our strategy games will keep using Flash. Our best developers will continue working on improving the game quality, adding new content, and implementing new features to provide you with the best game experience. We will also continue collecting feedback from our gaming community so we can create a perfect game together.
Thank you for sticking with us. We will keep you updated!
Plarium Team
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