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To reiterate, Adobe announced they were dropping mobile development since mobile devices didn't want to use it anyway since it's a CPU and battery hog.

When Unity heard this, they decided not to invest time and effort into making a Unity plugin that would let Flash load Unity content. When that was announced, AE decided to hold back on AQ3D.

Now that Flash is continuing to die off, it's making less and less sense to create content on it. It's not an attack on browser games, but more on how browser games are played. There are more options lately like HTML5 which requires no plugin to play. It just runs purely in your browser. Unity has been working on an HTML5 export so you may not even need a Unity Player plugin either but I don't think it's fully functional yet.

So Unity is actually growing and the biggest threat it has now is the same threat it's caused. For years, game engines have been inaccessible to the smaller development team because of the cost. Unreal would cost companies millions to license. Because Unity has gotten so popular and powerful, Unreal has now gone free. So Unity has no reason to stand down. It's created a great competition.

The biggest threat to AE games is market saturation. There are loads of mobile games and less and less browser games. AE as a whole is trying to cater to both browser AND mobile, which would be completely impossible using Flash. So switching gears to an engine that can port to both web and mobile is essential for us and Unity is best suited for that.

Don't confuse it with us giving up on our legacy games but at some point, Flash will never be updated and computers won't even natively support it and those games will one day go the ways of MS-DOS games that don't get updated either. Re-released? Maybe. But the originals will eventually get stuck behind simply because of advances in technology and you don't want to be the last one off the sinking ship when everyone else got off on the lifeboats of innovation.

TL;DR; Unity is going strong. Adobe is abandoning Flash. We need to flow WITH innovation and not constantly play catch-up and sometimes that will be at the cost of not updating our older games as often as we'd like to, but while still updating them in some capacity until it's no longer feasible.

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The biggest threat to AE games is market saturation. There are loads of mobile games and less and less browser games.

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I'll echo Rabble's comments. If it were easy to port Flash to Unity, there would already be an AQ Mobile, DF Mobile, etc... We wish it were that easy, but it's not. All of the code would need to be thrown out and rebuilt and the art assets would need to be converted into a format Unity could use. By working on a smaller project, we can learn the entire process of building a Unity game from start to finish with less chance of encountering staggering roadblocks.

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I'm glad you think so highly of our abilities! The reality is that Unity is a vastly different platform than Flash, and our art assets and code would not port over in any straightforward way. There's also always the expectation that EpicDuel 2 or ED Mobile would be at least as large as current ED is. Taking on a project that large without any prior experience with Unity would be extremely unwise since we would have to learn absolutely everything. With a smaller-scope project we can focus a smaller slice of that knowledge and not have to worry about the monumental tasks such as server development, security, connection stability, etc.

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You're still vastly underestimating the time required to do what you're saying. Trust me, if we had an easy way to port ED over the mobile devices, we absolutely would as soon as possible.

To take each of your points individually:
1) Sprite sheets and animation. As Korin demonstrated (better than I could), it's not a simple task to move anything into Unity without a massive file size and rework issue. Nearly everything is animated, and animations in Unity function differently than Flash so none of that would port smoothly or look good without so much rework that we're basically recreating every single item, class, skill, interface, button, etc. That alone is a staggering amount of work that would take months, not to mention that a lot of it is no longer up to the level of quality we would be happy with due to the natural increase in skill we've seen over the years.

2) We would not be happy just porting ED onto a phone and calling it a day. We've learned a lot over the years about design, gameplay, clarity, etc, and would want to build that into the game to make it better where we can. Again, we'd essentially be building a new game, even if it had a lot of the same fundamental elements to current ED.

3) C# actually is significantly better for development than JavaScript. It has better performance, is easier to test and debug, and is generally more feature-rich for the types of stuff we're doing. AS3 is not a scripting language, and across AE the majority of our Unity codebase is done in C#. The learning curve for us is almost negligible, so that's not the issue. The problem is that no matter what language we choose, it's not AS3, and it's not on web and so on, so everything would require a complete rewrite. Even if we were still able to use ActionScript, the game would necessarily have to be so different that our existing codebase would not be terribly useful. Our server code is also done on a MASSIVELY outdated platform that is no longer supported officially, so that is out the window.

All in all, you have to trust us that we've considered in great depth what kind of effort would be involved in a project like ED Mobile, and it would be immense, regardless of what shortcuts we tried to take. That on top of trying to learn an entire new tech stack is a recipe for disaster. We would rather take a more sensible approach and continue supporting ED instead of trying to replace it.

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BioBeasts Promo Pack in EpicDuel
We saw quite a few people in the comments section of BioBeasts’ FAQ asking about a possible EpicDuel Promotional Pack celebrating the launch of our mobile game. We love this idea so we’re running with it. You can expect a BioBeasts-themed EpicDuel Promo Pack to premiere around the launch of BioBeasts.

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We've also updated EpicDuel with the Heartbreaker Saga 2, Rabbits Return, another war (with a war coming up shortly), a prize code system, more daily missions, new boss fights, and all the returning rares and promotional items from past events.

Promo packs are super-exciting, but they take a huge amount of development time to build, test, balance, and market. To say BioBeasts is directly responsible for the lack of promos ignores all the content we have released since Frozen Fury.

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Promo packs are super-exciting, but they take a huge amount of development time to build, test, balance, and market

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You guys say that its time consuming and expensive to switch ED over to unity but wouldn't it be worth it? Bringing back a thousand players? If its "expensive" theres alot you can do such as return gifting or create more promos.

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Q: Why are you developing this and not EpicDuel 2 or EpicDuel Mobile?
A: Since the EpicDuel team is still very new to Unity, we decided to develop a small-scope mobile project to learn the basics of the platform. So far, we like what we see. Unity is far more powerful than Flash ever was and we’re learning more every day.

A project of the scale of EpicDuel 2 would be a monumental task. By focusing on a smaller project, we can avoid scope-creep and work through the entire process from conceptualization to a public launch quickly, building our team’s confidence toward larger projects.

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Q: Why are you developing this and not EpicDuel 2 or EpicDuel Mobile?
A: Since the EpicDuel team is still very new to Unity, we decided to develop a small-scope mobile project to learn the basics of the platform. So far, we like what we see. Unity is far more powerful than Flash ever was and we’re learning more every day.

A project of the scale of EpicDuel 2 would be a monumental task. By focusing on a smaller project, we can avoid scope-creep and work through the entire process from conceptualization to a public launch quickly, building our team’s confidence toward larger projects.