Adobe has released Flash Player 11.2 and has decided it’s high time the once-ubiquitous browser plug-in started earning the company a bit of money.

Starting Aug. 1, 2012, Adobe will begin taking a 9 percent cut of game developers’ net revenue over $50,000.

For most Flash developers that means the new revenue sharing plan will not have any effect, but for the very successful companies building Flash-based games using the new domain memory in combination with the Stage 3D hardware acceleration, the change may affect the bottom line.

Users of Flash Player 11 don’t need to pay anything.

There are two exceptions to Adobe’s new revenue-sharing model. The first way to avoid it is to crank out your app now, before that Aug. 1 deadline arrives. The second option is to switch over the developing for AIR, in which case there is no revenue sharing. That means that the new rules don’t apply to any AIR apps compiled to standalone apps for iOS or Android.

So what are you getting for your 9 percent fee? Access to what Adobe is calling Flash’s “premium” features category. The premium features all revolve around the hardware-accelerated Stage 3D graphics in Flash Player 11. The Stage 3D rendering in Flash 11 consists of a low level API that offers hardware-accelerated 2-D and 3-D graphics. Adobe claims that Stage 3D can deliver “console-quality games” in the browser.

Adobe says the new premium-tier features and the accompanying fees are aimed at “game developers interested in creating the most advanced, graphically sophisticated, next-generation games for the web.”

Of course developers may also note that Adobe’s announcement comes on the heels of an impressive HTML5 gaming demo from Mozilla, which might offer some game developers another possible way to avoid Adobe’s revenue sharing plan.

We’re giving away a pair of passes to Google I/O today.

A little over a week ago, we kicked off our contest, encouraging you to send us any HTML5 web apps or Google Chrome browser extensions you’ve built. Alternatively, we asked you to tell us how you’d describe a web app to your grandmother. We got a heap of submissions, but we worked our way through the field and picked two winners.

Abraham Williams and Mike Cantelon will be heading to Google’s premiere developer event, which takes place May 19 and 20 at Moscone Center in San Francisco, free of charge.

Here are the winning apps, chosen by the Webmonkey staff, along with a couple of honorable mentions:

Winner: Intersect by Abraham Williams

Williams came up with this cool extension for Chrome that shows additional information about a user’s followers on Twitter — in particular, it shows where you and another user’s social graphs overlap. Install the extension and visit somebody’s Twitter profile page. You’ll see additional grids loading below their stack of followers. You see which of your friends are also following that user, which friends you have in common and which followers you have in common. It’s an excellent social discovery tool for Twitter power users, and the best extension for Twitter’s stock web interface we’ve seen yet. Congrats, Abraham!

Winner: Blood Funnel by Mike Cantelon

Cantelon created this funky little game called Blood Funnel using JavaScript and HTML. It’s basically Space Invaders, except with flying, demonic Goldman Sachs bankers standing in for the buglike aliens. The paranoia is amped up by an awesome, thumping techno soundtrack — served up as an ogg file, of course. Check out Cantelon’s JavaScript source, it’s elegant. Caveat: Blood Funnel is nimble in Chrome, but it’s slower in Firefox. Congrats, Mike!

Runner Up: TabTweet by Nathanial Smith

Smith developed this Chrome extension which adds auto-complete functionality when you’re addressing @replies through Twitter’s web interface. When you go to start a new reply, you type the @ symbol and the extension kicks in, offering a dropdown list of your friends. It will continue to auto-complete the addresses as you type.

Runner Up: BitTorrent demo by Chris Lee

Lee took the old Aphid animated demo of BitTorrent (which you may remember from when we wrote about it, though the original link has gone the way of the ghost) and updated it using Processing.js. It runs in any browser that supports the <canvas> element, but, again, this one performs better in Chrome than in Firefox.

Best ‘Grandma’ Explainer by Curtis Tasker

“When you pull out your iPod and hit the Knit Buddy button to manage your needles and yarn, that’s what we call an ‘app.’ Now, let’s say you’re at the yarn store and you need to access your yarn and needle inventory to figure out what you need to buy for your latest creation. You realize you forgot your iPod at home. There’s no easy way to get access to the information you stored there. You could drive home and get your iPod, but it’s a long way. You could call Grandpa and attempt to have him look up the information, but what if he’s napping, or has the TV turned up too loud again? What if you could access your knitting inventory from your iPod, or your friends phone, or by the store’s computer? That’s what we call a “web app.” Instead of being stuck running an ‘app’ on a single device, and having your information locked to that device, you run a ‘web app’ on any device attached to the web, and you can access your information anywhere.”

Congrats to the winners, and thanks to everyone who sent in a submission for the contest. We’ll see the two of you — along with many more of you out there — at Google I/O in May.

“Up front, I’ll say that the reason we are moving to Flash is because of Java’s adoption rates. It is not, in fact, because of the language itself but because of Java’s deployment model. We suspect that we lose somewhere between thirty and fifty percent of users due simply to the fact that we are in Java.”

It probably comes as no surprise to anyone who has ever tried to load applets on the web. They are slow and prone to crashing. To be fair, the same could be said of other technologies, including Flash. Java tends to get more than its equal share of criticism, for what I’d call legitimate reasons.

Still, Java has been embraced for most mobile game development, excluding the iPhone. Google’s Android open development platform uses Java. Sun estimates that its Micro Edition of Java is deployed on billions of devices.

So, is Flash the answer? Flash has been popular for creating web-based games. Adobe’s Flex framework has made programming Flash easier, giving developers a more standard environment than a timeline. But Dale Beerman, the developer making the leap to Flash, admits Java’s development environment is still “years ahead” of Flash.

Flash is also mostly unproven as a mobile language. Apple has not allowed it on the iPhone, apparently over worries of battery life. Adobe announced that it has an iPhone version ready to go, should Apple change its mind. So, Flash is getting some mobile love.

The iPhone, of course, has its own development framework, based on Objective C. There are major benefits to developing for a device as well-loved as the iPhone. Unlike Java and Flash, games written for the iPhone cannot be used elsewhere.

As we said recently, mobile casual games are going to be big. There will always be multiple platforms, but the fight for number one is still in the early rounds. Do you think it’s fair to rag on Java? Is Flash a viable alternative? Or, will all the world eventually have an iPhone?

[Graphic by Dale Beerman]

See also:

• Adobe Confirms Flash on the iPhone, Apple Permitting
• Opera Mini: A New Browser For Mobile Devices

Though action games, which take advantage of the iPhone accelerometer, are quite popular, so are simple, graphics-light games that can be played in short bursts, but are also incredibly addictive. Bejeweled remains popular for paid apps, and four of the top free apps are games, including my new favorite, Trace.

The game at first appears a lot like Line Rider, a classic Flash game where you draw a course then watch your player move along it. Trace takes it a step further, as you avoid obstacles in order to finish each level.

The controls are way simple: you can move left and right, as well as jump. As for drawing your path, you can create or erase lines with the tip of a finger. With those few commands, much can be done. I’ve spent more time than I would like to admit playing Trace. And unfortunately for me, the app keeps track of the time.

I expect games like these to continue to grow in popularity on the iPhone, as the general public recognizes it’s a device worth the price. The iPhone is capable of graphics less childish than Trace’s crayon look, but mobile devices–and the ever popular casual games–don’t require a pretty face.

See also:

• Get $10K For Your iPhone Game
• Can’t Stop Playing Line Rider