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Another nail in the Flash's coffin - The rise of HTML5 Games



You'd probably already heard about Game Closure, but if you haven't this is what you been missing...

Game Closure is an independent student start-up company that developed a pretty interesting and amazingly robust Javascript/HTML5 game SDK. The SDK can be used to create games not only for web browsers (Facebook games) but they can be deployed also to iOS and Android devices. The SDK offers client/server real-time communication so this opens the possibility of massive multiplayer capabilities.

They have been recently in the spotlight turmoil since they presented Pop Star Defense, the first game to run in all mentioned platforms which they presented on Google I/O last summer. The interesting thing here is that this endeavor usually required up to 6 months to accomplish by traditional means to any Game Developer company regardless of their size, but it only took 5 weeks to the guys on Game Closure so everyone is looking at them with dollar signs on their eyes since then. Probably the most notable of this eagerly interested companies are of course the FaceBook and Zynga couple but also includes Motorola and EA.

I'm almost certain that Zynga will be the one ultimately acquiring the company, that's mainly because they lack the any solid HTML5 strategy this becomes obvious when you look at Zynga's game portfolio and realize that its almost 100% Flash based. In a culture where Flash is decaying and lingering like a sick old cat Zynga needs to make a tremendous leap before someone else picks up the market they drop to the floor , so for Zynga, Game Closure is precisely the way to get that leap. It has recently announced that Zynga has pushed the offer to around $100 million green bills, this is almost 8 folds bigger than the last offer Game Closure received (which was around $12 million).

So I guess will be seeing HTML based farms, coffee shops and cities in our friends and wives Facebook. This is just another push towards the edge of the abyss of oblivion for Flash. As I have expressed on on the past, the only thing (IMHO) keeping Flash from flatlining is precisely the dependence Zynga has (had) on it…
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