Interesting. So, I gather that what happened was iPhones and changes to coding languages (HTML5) which didn’t require an extra on the system (a plug in) to do it’s thing.
But then… Why didn’t the games transition with it then? Why didn’t people rewrite that style of game to play with the new technology?
A good chunk of games DID change with it. The Unity engine makes it very simple to design games for Web. But it's also easy to make those simple games for mobile instead, which has fewer restrictions abd is more prolific. In fact, a good chunk of the bigger flash game companies migrated to mobile. There's just little demand for a web game when I can create a mobile one, monetize it more easily, and reach a larger audience by making it for mobile instead
So, I gather that what happened was iPhones and changes to coding languages (HTML5) which didn’t require an extra on the system (a plug in) to do it’s thing.
... Sort of. That's a bit of an oversimplification and iPhone-centric, but generally the right idea.
I'd slightly shift this and say it's more that flash and Java had many known problems and were janky solutions to the limits of HTML of the day. They were continued to be supported by browsers because they were needed for certain tasks beyond games that were actually important. Games were just a secondary thing that were allowed to exist because the tech was there for other problems.
At the time, more "serious" games were mostly local installs outside your browser, and browser games were more "casual" and for the less technically inclined general audience. The main exception here was Runescape, and a couple others like Wizard 101 etc.
But then smartphones started becoming more popular, and they just could not run flash/Java effectively. They were inefficient from a performance standpoint, and smartphones were very behind in performance and it just didn't work well. In the early days, many Android phones would run bits of flash/Java, sometimes requiring custom browsers, but it just wasn't very performant.
Then HTML5 came along, solved most of the gaps in existing HTML tech, and the need for flash and Java greatly decreased. Because of the performance problems and security vulnerabilities, the industry as a whole basically gave up on them. There was no need beyond supporting games, as the functional shortcomings were covered, and HTML5 did somewhat support the same game tech, but it would take massive rewrites to get back there and there was basically no tooling. Adobe had spent over a decade building different Flash tools and people were being dumped to lower level tech with zero years of tooling development. Then came WebGL and some other tech... But nothing really made a good grip on the market.
Unity and some other projects allowed easier compilation to HTML5 and WebGL over the years, so this was definitely still possible but simultaneously the interest was plummeting so there wasn't much point.
Much of the popularity of web based games back in their day was you could just tell someone a URL and they could go play it on their home computer. Their allure was their accessibility, not the tech. The desire for high tech games was won over by standalone desktop games. But those were harder to find, required going to a store, making a purchase, bringing a CD home, installing said game, having the hardware to run it, etc.
But at the time of the death of Flash and Java, everyone carried a smartphone. They all had app stores and could just search the app store once, install the game, and have it easily accessible on their device, running at native performance. Console gaming had become commonplace. PC gaming was fairly common, with pre-built gaming PCs being a thing. Now Steam existed and you didn't have to go to a store or understand install processes. Every competing tech to web games was way more accessible. Smartphone tech better covered "gaming for the general populace".
What would be the point of a web game at that point? Fewer people have desktops so your market is smaller. If you're aiming for people's smartphones, doing stuff natively to two platforms is higher performance and easier to deal with. Console gaming is more common. PC gaming is a stable market. OK top of that, there's way less money in web based gaming. Stores like steam and console game stores have the expectation of spending money and an easy way to do so. Smartphones have native IAP support to make it easy to spend money on microtransactions. Web has.... Enter your payment information into that websites payment processor they have to integrate, which feels less safe to the user and requires more work from the developer than the alternatives on console/pc/mobile.
There's just no market for web based gaming anymore when people have so many more options available that are easy to access - what's the purpose of building a web based game at that point?
Flash was a wholistic platform. You could draw, animate, script, play video, compile, etc within a single comprehensive editor. HTML5 + JS was only the low level technology. There was no tooling supplied when the transition happened.
There have been some attempts to recreate the Flash ecosystem since then but they haven’t picked up steam.
Also, there was not any system for porting your existing stuff over to the new tech. Adobe abandoned Flash so you were left to figure it out on your own. These days Flash games can actually be emulated using the modern technology so porting is fairly feasible. But again people have already moved on.
people didnt want to spend an inordinate amount of time rewriting their entire application/game from scratch. the return on supporting an insecure, proprietary platform like Flash wasnt there.
Most of the successful games moved to Mobile. In particular Miniclip is almost exclusively a mobile games company now and still makes games like 8 ball pool
I'm going to go against the grain a little here and say you may have just grown out of it. A lot of kids have access to Chromebooks through their schools (at least in the States) and you better believe they know exactly where all the online games are.
And they got some really cool experiences we could never dream of. There are now several full games running in browsers, with 3d acceleration and everything. Play-cs or wipeout off the top of my head, but also a lot of older pc arcade and console games on archive.org and new originals on itch.io
Newgrounds still lives and flourishes, to this day it is still an incredibly active hub for free browser games and animations. Itch.io is another hub that is very active, both with free and paid games. Both have thousands of browser games, quality ranging from literal shit to truly excellent.
Flash may have died, but the browser game very much lives on.
I remember hacking my itouch and installing Cydia, then downloading a hack that added flash support. I felt amazing being able to play flash games at school
Just want to add, if you're feeling nostalgic about some of these Flash games and want to play them again, download Y8 browser. My personal favorites are Warlords: Call to Arms, and Steppenwolf: The X-Creatures project.
Like others said, most web games made in 2000s up to mid 2010s were flash based. When adobe killed flash web game makers either had to re-write the game completely in html5+javascript or leave them to die. Flashpoint is an extremely comprehensive archive of almost every known flash game + an emulator to play them.
Is facebook not full of them? When I used facebook in the early days of facebook games, there were lot's of flash games that later transitioned to HTML5. Games like Farmtown got copied and monetised (e.g. Farmville).
I think the company was Zynga that copied new indie facebook games (I seem to recall drama) and monetised them.
I don't know what flash games you were playing but I can't remember any that I'd describe as quality. The ones I were playing were mostly user uploaded ones made with pirated versions of flash dev tools (I was known to make my own for a while too - this may have ifluenced what I was exposed to).
The most polished games I can think of outside of facebook pre-HTML5 were those ones where you drag the clothes off the woman and it's a photo of her naked underneath. I seem to recall settings for changing breasts too.