With the shutdown of Adobe’s Flash platform, game developers have faced the reality of abandoning two decades of development work on millions of Flash games completely or starting over from scratch. While Flash may no longer exist, the impact that it had on the game industry was massive. So, where does the shutdown leave developers who spent a lot of time and effort creating successful games on the platform? 

That was the problem Vavel Games was facing with their massively multiplayer online real-time strategy title Imperium: Galactic War. Acquired by Vavel in 2017, the game was re-released in 2018 and has been a popular PvP game where tens of thousands of players can simultaneously battle for control of a war-torn universe. But with Flash disappearing at the end of 2020, would IGW meet the same fate?

While the process of migrating a Flash-only game to HTML5 or Unity can be expensive and time-consuming, Vavel found that by utilizing Game Launcher, they could publish a standalone version of IGW and incorporate new features at the same time. By partnering with Xsolla, Vavel created a brand-new launcher dubbed the ‘Vavel Dragon Launcher.’ This new launcher serves as a hub and community tool providing news, special offers, and even promoting other games to players, all without the need for a browser.

What’s even better is that this same process can be applied to other Flash-based games, many of which now face extinction. “We are talking about over 250,000 games that can not be accessed by the wider player community,” said Vavel Games CCO Mikolaj Marcisz. “Many of them are now abandoned by their creators and will likely never be ported to something like Unity 3D. Source codes being lost, studios disbanded… those games will never be ported, and the internet community will suffer the loss."

By working together with Xsolla, Vavel streamlined the user experience for Imperium: Galactic War by launching a brand-new, customized installer. Are you interested in saving your Flash-based game for a new generation of players? Contact Xsolla today.