先放原文 ~

The Future of Flash on Armor Games

Dec 8th, 2020

Dear Armor Games Players,

Flash’s end-of-life is fast approaching in January of 2021. First, thank you for your years of dedication to the site and countless hours playing the best free web games over the past 15+ years. Second, we wanted to reassure all of you that we’ll continue to be a great place to play games with new games coming in each week and supporting our legacy Flash content as well as we can.

To provide some history, Adobe announced in 2017 that its Flash player and browser plugins would be end-of-life at the end of 2020. All of the major browsers soon followed in a coordinated effort outlining their plans to remove the Flash player from their browsers:

• Saying goodbye to Flash in Chrome（原文链接： https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/saying-goodbye-flash-chrome/ ）

• Firefox Roadmap for Flash End-of-Life（原文链接： https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2017/07/25/firefox-roadmap-flash-end-life/ ）

• The End of an Era – Next Steps for Adobe Flash (IE11/Edge)（原文链接： https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/07/25/flash-on-windows-timeline/ ）

Armor Games currently offers over 3,700 Flash games dating back to 2007. In 2014, HTML5 games started to become more widely available and slowly began replacing Flash for web games. Here is a quick chart comparing the percentage of released Flash vs. HTML5 games on Armor Games over our site’s lifetime:

You may not have even noticed our new games are no longer Flash. HTML5 has continued to mature as a games technology, and we’re excited to see the future of this technology and the incredible games to come with it.

Given our large catalog of Flash games, we would like to continue to offer these games to our players as well as help preserve Flash games in general. Flash is an important medium for game developers and many developers have fond memories and experiences creating and publishing games using its technology. Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be any perfect solution or replacement for Adobe’s Flash player as of writing this post in December of 2020. Outlining some potential solutions and our thoughts on each of them:

• Converting games to HTML5 (or other technologies) – This can be an ideal solution but can’t be done in any mass or automated way, as it is expensive and time-consuming.

• Requiring a desktop application to play Flash content – We don’t believe in asking you to install third-party software to play web games is a great experience. Part of the joy of web games is the ease of dropping into games whenever and however you want, and we want to preserve that.

• Flash emulation in the browser – This is our final and most preferred solution. With all of today’s modern browsers supporting WebAssembly (a technology that enables high-performance applications to run safely on web pages), it is perfect for this task. While several emulation options are still in development, the ones we have explored currently support a small number of games and will continue to support more in the future.

We have always strived to deliver the best web games with a seamless experience. Given our research and play testing, we have decided to use Ruffle（原文链接：https://ruffle.rs/）, an open-source Flash emulation project to continue offering as many Flash games as we can. Our Ruffle integration will not require installing any software or making changes to browser settings.

Games that do not work with Ruffle will be temporarily deactivated on January 12, 2021. We don’t see this deactivation as permanent, and we will continue to seek solutions that allow for in-browser, plugin-free ways for you to enjoy every one of your favorite games. The game pages themselves will remain live, as a way for you to post comments and talk about the games with friends. As soon as we have a solution to bring deactivated games back, we will.

If you have made a purchase in a Flash game using the Armor Games payment system since October 1, 2020, we welcome you to contact support@armorgames.com for a full refund. We will mention that your purchases go directly to allowing us to continue to maintain the Armor Games website and also to the developers creating these games. Your support is always appreciated, but we will be happy to refund you for content that will not be playable in the near future. Any purchases you have on your account will remain, and will be accessible again when we are able to reactivate those respective games.

Again, thank you so much for being an amazing community and the best supporters of free games anywhere on the internet. The Armor Games website is not going anywhere and we continue to release new games every week. We look forward to continuing to game with you for a long time to come.

– The Armor Games Team

译文（屑人机翻警告）：

ARMOR Game中Flash游戏的未来

2020年12月8日

亲爱的ARMOR Game玩家，

Flash即将在2021年1月开始终止使用。首先，感谢您多年来对网站的奉献以及过去15多年来玩最好的免费网络游戏的无数小时。其次，我们想向大家保证，我们将继续成为玩游戏的好地方，每周都会推出新游戏，并尽可能支持我们的旧Flash内容。

为了提供一些历史记录，Adobe在2017年宣布其Flash播放器和浏览器插件将在2020年底终止使用。所有主要的浏览器很快就共同努力，概述了从其浏览器中删除Flash播放器的计划：

• 在Chrome中告别Flash

• Firefox生命周期终止路线图

• 时代的终结– Adobe Flash的后续步骤（IE11 / Edge）

Armor Games目前提供可追溯到2007年的3,700多个Flash游戏。2014年，HTML5游戏开始变得越来越普及，并逐渐开始取代Flash替代网页游戏。这是一张快速图表，用于比较Armor Games在我们网站的生存期内已发布的Flash游戏与HTML5游戏的百分比：

您甚至可能没有注意到我们的新游戏不再是Flash。HTML5作为一种游戏技术一直在不断发展成熟，我们很高兴看到该技术的未来以及随之而来的令人难以置信的游戏。

鉴于我们佣有大量的Flash游戏，我们希望继续为玩家提供这些游戏，并总体上帮助保留Flash游戏。Flash是游戏开发人员的重要媒介，许多开发人员都拥有使用其技术创建和发布游戏的美好回忆和经验。不幸的是，截至2020年12月撰写本文时，似乎还没有完美的解决方案或Adobe Flash播放器的替代品。概述了一些潜在的解决方案以及我们对每个解决方案的看法：

• 将游戏转换为HTML5（或其他技术） –这可能是理想的解决方案，但由于成本高昂且费时，因此无法以任何大规模或自动化的方式完成。

• 需要台式机应用程序来播放Flash内容 –我们不认为要求您安装第三方软件来玩网络游戏是一种很好的体验。网页游戏的乐趣之一就是随时随地都可以轻松加入游戏，而我们希望保留这一点。

• 浏览器中的Flash模拟 –这是我们最终的首选方案。借助当今所有支持WebAssembly（一种使高性能应用程序在网页上安全运行的技术）的现代浏览器，它非常适合完成此任务。尽管一些模拟选项仍在开发中，但我们目前探索的模拟选项仅支持少量游戏，并且将来将继续支持更多游戏。

我们一直致力于提供无缝体验最好的网页游戏。根据我们的研究和游戏测试，我们决定使用Ruffle（一个开放源代码Flash模拟项目）来继续提供尽可能多的Flash游戏。我们的Ruffle集成不需要安装任何软件或更改浏览器设置。

不适用于Ruffle的游戏将于2021年1月12日暂时停用。我们不会将这种停用视为永久停用，我们将继续寻求解决方案，以允许浏览器内无插件的方式让您享受各种乐趣您最喜欢的游戏之一。游戏页面本身将保持实时状态，以便您发表评论并与朋友谈论游戏。一旦我们有了将停用的游戏重新带回的解决方案，我们就会。

如果您自2020年10月1日起使用Armor Games付款系统购买Flash游戏，我们欢迎您联系support@armorgames.com以获得全额退款。我们会提到，您的购买将直接使我们能够继续维护Armor Games网站，也使开发这些游戏的开发商得以继续。我们始终感谢您的支持，但我们很乐意为您退还不久将无法播放的内容。您帐户上的所有购买都将保留，并且当我们能够重新激活相应的游戏时，它们将再次可以访问。

再次感谢您成为一个令人惊叹的社区以及互联网上任何地方免费游戏的最佳支持者。Armor Games网站无处不在，我们每周继续发行新游戏。我们期待在很长一段时间内继续为您服务。

–ARMOR Game团队