Migrating Games from Flash to Open Web Standards on Facebook

Today, Adobe announced its plans to stop updating and distributing Flash Player at the end of 2020. We're working with Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Unity to create a migration path for developers that use Flash to power their games on Facebook.

Open Web Standards Advancements for Games
As open web standards like WebGL and HTML5 rapidly advanced to offer many of the web game development capabilities provided by Flash, it became clear that Flash's lifespan was limited.

As a result, we've partnered with game developers to support their HTML5 efforts, helping them continue to deliver games on Facebook. Today, more than 200 HTML5 games are live on our platform, most of which launched within the last year. Many of the largest developers on the platform — including King, Plarium and others — migrated at least one Flash game to HTML5 on the Facebook platform with minimal impact to their existing customers.

Existing Web Games Built in Flash
While games built in Flash will run on Facebook until the end of 2020, we strongly advise developers to follow the timelines set by browsers, as this may impact your decision to migrate sooner. The first milestone to target is summer of 2018 when Chrome introduces click-to-play for Flash-based content. To learn more about browser-specific timelines, check out the official announcements from Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla.

As developers evaluate their migration path, they'll have options to reach and engage with millions of players on Facebook.

• HTML5 technology: Supported by all major browsers today, without the need for plugin-ins, HTML5 is quickly becoming the best path forward for web game development. With a wide range of engines and tools available, there are several methods to migrate Flash games to HTML5. Check out the list of available tools and libraries, HTML5 engines, cross-platform engines, and our Facebook-Unity WebGL option, which lets developers easily port their Unity games over to HTML5.
• Gameroom: Developers may benefit from making their games available on Gameroom, Facebook's PC desktop gaming app. Gameroom was built to support games in native or web formats developed from game engines and standards including cocos2D, HTML5, Unity, Unreal, and WebGL. Developers are seeing strong results from Gameroom, and the platform has more than 1,000 games across 10+ categories. To learn more and start building for Gameroom, check out resources on our developer site.

More Migration Support
To support our web game developers further, we're offering the following resources:

• Our Unity WebGL guide: This guide provides steps on publishing games from Unity to WebGL.
• Training Webinars: Join us August 30 and October 25 to learn how to effectively migrate games off Flash with minimal impact to your business. To save your spot, please register here.

For developers building new games for Facebook.com, we strongly recommend using open web standards.

As we march towards 2020, and the subsequent deadlines set by browsers, we'll offer more resources for developers to aid in the migration path.

Today's news marks the continued evolution of web and desktop gaming, and we're committed to working with developers to preserve their gaming experiences on Facebook.