Important game developers like ‘Arcade Town games’ and ‘Miniclip Games’ seem to have a hold on the flash game market, as their flash game titles get increasingly popular due to their complexity and higher quality gaming experience they deliver.  Flash games created by these and other flash game developers are made exclusively for the internet. Initially, most original games fresh out of the creators minds show up in the owners website, but they don’t last long before they start to appear in most other free flash game websites in the web. Most would say this kind of piracy doesn’t add up to the game creators as a business model, but it does when all games have preponderant links and images pointing back to your site.

Today, game developers are not only embarking in game projects based in the flash platform. You are likely to come across games made in several other formats (*.swf, *.dcr, *.flv), and many other formats are sure to arise. A new fad, of which I have only seen one instance of, is the hosted game. Many of us are familiar with the ‘multimedia online role playing game (MMORPG), which has taken the internet by storm. However, these game platforms, such as Runescape and World of Warcraft, require some kind of local client installation on your computer, which then serves to connect to the game server. This allows for a faster gaming experience by splitting the resources required to play the game between the game server hosting the game, and your home computer. The biggest difference between this type of game and a hosted game is you don’t need to download anything, yet keep all the nice features of the client based game. You can also imagine the marketing possibilities by distributing a free flash game all over the web that links the user to your server to play the game. The flash game screen that pops up is not hosted in the website presenting the game, but on the website of the original developer, allowing them to show all kinds of ads, messages, members, etc. Looking at the online game playing trends, games are becoming more and more complex, with more exiting special effects and detailed backgrounds. They evolve into a complicated plot which demands the player to save the game for later. It could take an online player days, even weeks to finish some of the latest free online games.

So what will these practices lead us too? Game developers are no longer satisfied with a 2 minute playing experience, and neither are the website owners that sponsor these games. The thought that online games may become addictive does come to mind, although cases of this nature have not been widely documented. In the end, we can all hope for the best, and perhaps think of positive contributions of the free addictive games available in the web. Can they help in the development of young mind?