Why Browser Games Are Back — And What Changed Since Flash Died

For a decade, browser games were how most people on the internet first played anything. Then Adobe killed Flash at the end of 2020, and the whole category felt like it died with it. If you were watching casual gaming at the time, the story looked settled: apps had won, and the browser was for YouTube.

Six years later, that story turned out to be wrong. Browser gaming is one of the fastest growing corners of casual gaming again. If you are curious why, here is what I think actually changed, from the inside of a small browser-games operator.

The technology actually caught up

The simple story is "HTML5 replaced Flash," but that undersells how long it took to be true. Early HTML5 games, around 2012 to 2017, were worse than Flash games in almost every measurable way. They were slower, uglier, and the audio was broken half the time. If you played a web game in that window, you probably remember it fondly only because you were twelve.

The quiet turning point was around 2021 to 2023, driven by three unrelated improvements. WebGL got good enough to run shader-heavy games at a stable sixty frames per second on a four-year-old laptop. WebAssembly made it realistic to port Unity and Godot games to the web without a quality cliff. And mobile browsers finally caught up to desktop in both performance and standards compliance.

Together those three threads mean a modern HTML5 game is not just "close to" a native app on performance. For the kind of games we feature — short, snappy, two-dimensional — it is indistinguishable.

App stores stopped being a free growth channel

The second half of the story is less about technology and more about discovery. Around 2016, you could ship a casual game on the App Store and reasonably expect to be found through featured lists, store search, or the "games like this" rail.

By 2024, almost nobody shipped a small game and found an audience that way. The App Store surfaces whatever already has the most installs, the top of search is bought by a handful of large studios, and the only cost-effective way for a tiny studio to reach a new player is paid acquisition — which the economics of a free casual game cannot support.

Compare that with the open web. A player can land on a game from a search result, a shared link, or a browser extension — none of which require getting past a gatekeeper. That is the same discovery model that made Flash games spread in the first place, and the same model that makes short-form video spread today.

The player side changed too

A quieter trend: the people who played Flash games as kids now have jobs where they take breaks at a computer. The desktop browser-game audience never actually left. They just had nothing to play for a few years.

Meanwhile, the mobile audience that grew up on hyper-casual app games now expects "tap, play, done" as a baseline — and discovers that a browser can deliver it with less friction than the App Store, because there is no sign-up and no install.

Both audiences meet in the same place: a tab you open, play for five minutes, and close. That is the format we built TheMiniGames around, and it is the format every browser-game operator I know is seeing growth in.

What we are watching next

Three things we are paying attention to, in rough order of how much they matter:

Payments without the app store tax. If browser games can collect small payments without routing through Apple or Google, the economics of indie-scale casual development get a lot more interesting. Nothing dramatic has shipped yet, but the primitives (Web Payments, passkeys, saved cards in browsers) are now good enough that a small studio could build around them.

Progressive web apps as a middle ground. A player who likes your game can "install" it to their home screen without going through a store review. It is the same code, same URL. We expect this to be a bigger retention lever than daily rewards within a year.

Server-authoritative multiplayer getting easier. Running real-time multiplayer in a browser used to be a dark art. It is now a weekend project. We are not shipping any multiplayer titles yet, but the first time somebody drops a great browser-native competitive game, the category gets another wave.

For now

If you have not opened a browser game since the Flash years, the gap in experience is bigger than you expect. The honest test is to open a few on your phone and your laptop and see how fast they load. We would like to think our catalog is a good starting point — it is small enough that nothing in it is garbage, and we have been strict about what makes it in, in a specific way we have written up elsewhere.

If browser gaming does keep growing at the pace it has over the last two years, the next generation of players may remember the open web the way my generation remembers it — as a place where you could just click a link and play.