Adobe seems to be trying extremely hard to remain relevant in the worked of gaming. Today, they announced Flash Player 11.2 and AIR 3.2, which strengthen Adobe’s goal to enable ‘console quality’ games like Shadowgun on your web browser.
11.2 allows for mouse lock, relative mouse coordinates, right/middle click events, multi threaded video decoding and the capability for hardware accelerated 2D and 3D graphics for gameplay at up to 60 frames a second. AIR 3.2, Adobe’s platform for building cross platform web apps, comes with Stage3D for mobile, the technology Adobe released in October for desktops that is at present used in graphically intensive titles like Spaced Away and ApexVJ.
Adobe has also announced a collaboration with Unity, which allows Unity customers to publish 3D games to Flash Player. The release plays along with the Flash roadmap Adobe posted in February that also highlight ‘premium’. A good thing is that the new Flash Player can automatically update itself in the background on Windows.
Adobe appears to giving an incentive by promising not to charge developers who use Flash 11.2 until an app achieves $50,000 in revenue. After that point, 9% of an app’s revenue goes to Adobe, which keeps a keen eye on finances through regular reports collected from developers who use Flash’s new premium features. AIR apps using the premium features will not get taxed at all. These new terms will be enforced from August 1st, 2012.
What Adobe is trying to achieve is simple. They want to change their image as a simple tool that plays H.264 video and low def games to a ‘game console for the web’ that can earn developers real money.
