We’re mostly back from FGS and GDC! During the conferences I was asked for a couple of pieces of information. They’re pretty interesting, so I figured I’d share them with everybody. These stats are for games uploaded in the last six months.
AS2 versus AS3
As you can see, AS2 is still holding its ground quite well; it’s been at 33% for over a year. But nevertheless, several big sponsors told us that they are phasing out AS2 support this year. (Yes, we did plead your case: there are a lot of great AS2 games still being made!) In the end, it just costs too much for them to support two completely different code-bases, and when these sponsors try to do new and clever things with their libraries (like integrate with Facebook for scoreboards), they are running into technical limitations of AS2.
I know that AS2 die-hards don’t want to hear this (and personally, I think AS2 is a much cooler language for non-programmers to make games in), but I think the writing is on the wall. Make 2011 the year you switch to AS3!
AS3 Development Environments
If you develop in AS2, then you pretty much have to develop in Flash Professional. But there are a lot more options if you develop in AS3. Which is most popular? Well, we can’t tell that for 100% certain, but there are telltale indicators for most of the popular IDEs embedded into the SWFs they make. So by examining these markers, we are able to tell approximately how popular each development environment is:
One very interesting thing to note is that the various versions of Flash Professional are responsible for 55% of the AS3 games on our site (along with 100% of the AS2 games, of course)! This is definitely not what big companies expected to hear. Even some Adobe employees didn’t realize that Flash Pro was still so popular for game development. Most of the mega-corporations we’ve talked to assume that Flex or pure AS3 games are the vast majority, with Flash Pro used only to create assets. This just isn’t true. We’ve been educating companies about this for a while.
We don’t have enough historical data to tell if Flash Pro use is waning or waxing, but my guess is that the newest Flash Pro’s excellent mobile-device support will keep it pretty high.
So even if sponsors phase out AS2 support, they will continue to need to support both .FLA-based games and pure AS3 projects in their leaderboards, preloaders, and so on. (This is much easier than supporting both AS2 and AS3, though, so there’s not too much worry there.)
A note on these numbers: these stats are based on the final SWF uploaded to our website… so if you used Flash to do animations and then embedded them in Flex, your game counted as a Flex app. These numbers are based on the SWFs uploaded from August 2010 to today [...]
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