Another nail in the coffin of dedicated consoles perhaps, it opened up the promise of a new distribution channel for high quality 3D games, something that rival middleware company Unity has been quicker than Epic to officially support.
As released in what it's calling a 'developer preview' as part of the Unity 3.5 open beta, the company is backing the move with a $20,000 development contest, running until 5 January 2012.
"It's a long time since we had a real competition with a cash prize, so we're really excited to see what people can come up with, especially over a short period of time," explains CEO David Helgason.
"Personally I'm surprised that there haven't been more high end games using Flash 11 yet, but I think it's due to a lack of tools.
"That's where we come in and we want to encourage as many developers as possible to test out the technology."
But not for mobile browsers
Adobe's Stage3D technology (previously codenamed Molehill) enables browser-based 3D hardware-acceleration and supports 64-bit operating systems natively. According to Adobe, this offers an 1,000-times performance boost in terms of rendering 2D and 3D content compared to Flash 10.
"The move builds on our experience in terms of offering an open cross platform development toolset," explains Helgason.
"The beta is robust - there are some features not yet included. But Flash isn't the only addition to Unity 3.5. It's a huge release for us. We could have labelled it Unity 4.0."
Still, with Adobe dropping ongoing support for the mobile version of Flash, this releases doesn't apply to Unity developers targetting iOS and Android, who will continue to support those platforms natively.
You can find out more about the competition here (goes live at 4pm GMT).
