Ok so I had a long discussion today with a collegue at work about unity vs flash 3D. And as always the wildcard of plugin penetration comes out. Flash has 99 percent plugin penetration so it doesn’t matter if Unity is the dogs bollocks cause flash will win regardless just because of that.
I’m getting kinda tired of this and feel more and more that this is a selfulfilling prophecy. Companies don’t dare to try new solutions because of the fear that people won’t accept another plugin than flash and therefor flash will continue to be the nr one solution and retain market lead and highest plugin penetration.
To me it seems that people go to much further hassle all the time to get content if they believe they will get something worthwhile in return. And if you can’t excite people enough to get them to install the unity plugin how much chance is it that your game would be a success anyway?
Are there any great products that have failed because of low plugin penetration that you know of?
Flash 3D actually has a flashy 0% penetration actually
and I doubt that any great product ever died due to plugin penetration.
most that fail fail cause they are bad, the plugin penetration only adds up against it on a base of desaster
Windows users trust flash, at least if they aren’t security savy and worried.
Mobile users, mac users and linux users commonly agree on the fact that Flash better is gone sooner than later so something that works and doesn’t globber and spam the system performance like stupid can take its place …
flash hasn’t learned anything since Adobe bought up macromedia, all they added was hw accelerated movie decoding in all these years basically, which is laughable given that 2D hw acceleration ceased to exist 8 years ago.
I don’t exactly like WebGL due to its binding to JS, but I wouldn’t mind seeing html 5 + CSS3 + apple CSS3 extensions + WebGL grow much faster than they do to push adobe into the corner and out of the game sooner than later.
also to me copperlicht would be the larger threat to unity than flash 3d cause it runs without any plugin at all
The workflow to me isn’t a problem, flash or flex + flash develop as language / dev are fine.
its the technology that has not developed for more than half a decade and thats what I hope will break its neck more sooner than later as they will not adress the problem. if they were interested in it, they would have bought the scaleform devs long ago to get a 3d accelerated flash execution
the new flash 3d won’t help there cause it won’t enhance anything thats out now as it is a completely distinct new API
On a more personal observation, I have not had any reluctance from anyone I know with regards to installing the Unity player. I just purchased Unity Pro recently, so I don’t have much experience in a professional setting at the moment. However, I do have a client that I’m currently working with that chose to use Unity over Flash for our project, even after I laid out all of the pros and cons (probably coming across more biased towards Flash if anything). I was very happy when Unity was chosen as I much prefer it over Flash.
So while the market penetration can play a role in the decision to use Flash over Unity, I think there are also a lot of folks out there ready to move on to a newer technology and better graphics. Adobe is not stepping up in this regards, so I think UT is playing the angle quite well at the moment.
If you watch the talk, they said that unity has a plugin rate of 40 million. That most gamers who will be willing to play your game will already have unity installed anyway.
I mean you create a game that is comprable to a flash game, if your game could be done with flash than probably because of the penetration rate you are going to lose. If you offer something that flash can not do, then they can not even compete so thats how you have to leverage it IMHO. For example you couldnt do anything close to interstellar marines in flash. http://www.indiepubgames.com/game/Interstellar_Marines:_Running_Man
