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Oct 12

How the iPhone’s App Store Could Stimulate the Flash Economy

Posted in: Apple, developers, flash, iPhone, Phones, Software, Today's Chili

Thanks to new tools provided by Adobe, the iPhone has the potential to transform the Flash programmer community from an experimental playground into a lucrative industry.

Adobe last week announced that its new version of the Flash Professional CS5 developer kit will include tools to convert software written in Flash into standalone iPhone apps. That creates the opportunity for Flash developers to submit Flash-ported iPhone apps to Apple; if Apple approves those apps, they can then be sold through the iTunes App Store.

The community of Flash programmers is 1 million strong, according to Adobe, but very few of them make any decent money since the platform lacks a clear and consistent business model. Thus, the prospect of selling software through the App Store, which has served over 2 billion downloads and earned some developers hundreds of thousands of dollars, could be enticing to many Flash developers.

The result could be a large flood of new Flash-ported iPhone apps, as well as heightened interest in developing for the Flash platform.

“Whether the iPhone can bolster a good enough performance to do intensive mobile Flash games we are unsure of,” said John Cooney, head of game development at Flash game company Armor Games. “But if it can it’s going to open up doors for several Flash game developers, including myself personally, to become iPhone developers.”

Why aren’t many Flash programmers making a living off their code? It’s just not very easy to do. If you’re in the Flash industry and you’re not a big studio-affiliated website like Hulu — or if you’re not employed to develop Flash for larger companies — you’re most likely an independent developer coding games. For creators of Flash games, there are three primary sources of revenue: 1.) Up-front sponsorship deals with larger websites (such as Kongregate.com or AddictingGames.com), in which developers agree to brand their games with the website’s company name; 2.) Selling licenses of their games to other web portals, allowing visitors to play the game for free; 3.) Embedding advertising into their games.

The major hurdle for independent Flash programmers is the difficulty of getting people to pay for website-based games, said Greg McClanahan, game sponsorship director of Kongregate. And that’s where the App Store might help.

“Flash developers can already get a few million views of their game and it wouldn’t be a huge deal, nor would they necessarily make significant money from it,” McClanahan said. “They’re coming from an industry where it’s very difficult to charge people for their games, though I imagine it would be a lot easier on the iPhone than on the web, due to the different mentalities of the potential customers.”

Because Flash programming isn’t a highly lucrative business, many of the game developers in the Flash community are teenagers or college students making games for the sake of learning and experimentation; money is a side goal, McClanahan said. Also, Flash development is popular in third-world countries. Thanks to currency exchange rates, that means a little bit of revenue can still add up to a lot of money for an overseas programmer. If, for example, a programmer receives sponsorship from U.S.-based Kongregate, he’ll receive U.S. dollars no matter where he’s coding — even a third-world country where the dollar is strong.

“A guy in Indonesia made enough off his Flash game and bought a house,” McClanahan said. However, he added, “[those] results [are] not typical.”

Whether bigger entrepreneurs are going to step into Flash programming because of the iPhone will depend on the results for Flash-ported iPhone apps in the App Store.

There have, in fact, already been a few big App Store hits from Flash developers who manually recoded their games using the iPhone SDK. In June, Armor Games’ $1 puzzle game Shift reached no. 6 in Apple’s list of top paid apps for over 40 days, according to iPhone app review site 148Apps. That translated into $30,000 in revenue, and the game is continuing to sell 1,000 copies per month, according to Shift developer Daniel McNeely.

Another popular Flash-ported iPhone game was Bloons, which reached as high as no. 2 in the App Store in May and spent over 100 days in the top 100 paid apps list, according to 148Apps.

“I think I’d call that a success,” said Jeff Scott, editor of 148Apps.

Whether the iPhone will dramatically stimulate the Flash economy is up for debate. Adobe’s new conversion tools won’t be available until the end of the year, so concrete data won’t be available until early 2010. Also, Flash developers might be turned off by horror stories uttered by iPhone programmers who have failed to make money, largely due to Apple’s inconsistent and unclear App Store approval policies.

However, what is clear is what Adobe has in mind with this new Flash-to-iPhone conversion tool: Evangelizing more developers and getting them to join the Flash community, said James McQuivey, a Forrester analyst.

“From Adobe’s side what they’re hoping for is that people who are currently developing using Apple’s tools might be able to do future versions of their product with Flash,” McQuivey said. “From a developer’s perspective you’d rather write once and port to one common application on several devices. It’s not going to be Apple’s development language that ports to the connected TVs and netbook computers and so on. It’s more likely it’s going to be Flash.”

Regardless of whether or not Adobe’s Flash-convertion tool will produce an impact, the Flash programmers will definitely benefit from having the option to port their software into iPhone apps, Cooney said.

“If I can make a game, stick it on a web page, stick it on my iPhone, and then stick it wherever else Flash decides to go, then I am most certainly going to find it much more lucrative,” Cooney said.

Updated 12 p.m. PDT to draw a clearer comparison between independent iPhone app developers and independent Flash developers.

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Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com