Adobe announced earlier today that Shockwave will be discontinued, and the Shockwave player for Windows will no longer be available to download after April 9. 

This news follows Adobe's decision to end Flash support in 2020, pushing developers to wean their projects from the plugin and move on to newer tech in order to maintain support for their browser-based games.

Similar to Flash, Shockwave supported many browser-based games hosted on the Internet during the early 2000s. It's likely that the discontinuation of Shockwave support may break older web games and make them unplayable. 

"As technologies evolve and the use of mobile devices has grown, interactive content has moved to platforms such as HTML5 Canvas and Web GL and usage of Shockwave has declined," Adobe said.

The company went on to explain that enterprise customers will continue receiving support until their contracts expire in 2022.