[benologist]

It's not about generating iPad sales, it's about monetizing iPad users.

Would people like to access their favorites (not to mention new content) on Armor Games, MiniClip, Addicting Games, Kongregate etc? Just because they can't doesn't mean they wouldn't if these guys can pull it off.

[brk]

You make an excellent point.

The question then will be, how much is it worth to play silly Flash games? Will there be a monthly access charge, or will it be advertisement funded?

While I'm sure some subset of iPad users would like to such up more of their freetime with silly content, I'm still doubtful that this is a "business".

[benologist]

Silly is very offensive and dismissive of how big flash gaming really is - 10s of millions of people spend millennia every day playing Flash games without even counting Facebook, and some of those games achieve or inspire great success! It's very unfair to label them as silly just because there is a high volume of bad games - iOS is definitely not immune to that.

Flash games are also a big business - SPIL Games, Armor Games, Addicting Games, Kongregate, MiniClip, MaxGames, ArcadeBomb, Slix Media, Bored, not to mention all the social games and giants of that industry are massively popular and collectively investing many millions into producing and licensing new content every month.

At the top end the content is so great assholes steal Flash games and port them to iOS themselves under new names.

For monetization there's some interesting strategies they could take there - their own marketplace/portal for Flash games, working directly with the giant arcade portals to create apps for them, in-game advertising/virtual goods, etc.

[brk]

Silly is very offensive and dismissive of how big flash gaming really is

I think you're much closer to it than I am, though I admit I did mean that comment somewhat dismissively.

IMO, Flash is dead. It never properly innovated into the mobile device market, and it frankly never even innovated properly into OS X. There are lots of flash games, but probably even more annoying-as-fuck-all flash ads.

I think there is a huge opportunity for someone to create a new iteration of the flash concept, but one that is properly multi-platform enabled, and gives users more control and abilities to prevent cookies and unwanted popups.

This remote desktop as a service just to get flash content thing seems like, to me, a prime example of "you're doing it wrong".

I agree that gaming is huge, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. But Flash gaming is a concept/technology that is over.

[benologist]

What this really does is bridge the gap between Flash-and-mobile for the many companies & devs who created the mountains of games in Flash and will likely continue to for several more years even if Adobe continues to screw everything up - if Flash is doomed it's going to be a slow, slow death because in spite of Adobe it is a massive platform that's not going to disappear overnight.

But beyond that if these guys can make it bi-directional and pull mobile games to web then they're going to have an absolute killer product. If they can also go mobile-to-mobile then it'll just be crazy - publish to a platform, publish to all platforms. Streaming games, weird as it seems, looks like its got legs - onlive etc are doing it, it's really only the scale of the games that is changing.

As far as ads go I don't think that's even worth exploring (although that's in large part my bias towards games) - they have such short shelf lives they can adapt to new platforms without even considering legacy material.