To me this indicates an incomplete understanding of why game developers would move to AS3. In my eyes the main reason would be it’s more greater completeness in terms of support for OO development. AS3 is far from true OO such that evidenced by C++ and Java, but it’s a darn sight better in the OO sense than AS2 was. Clinging to old technology because it’s what you know is not always a good reason for sticking with that option, particularly when asking yourself “what will I be capable of, when using this newer technology, X months down the line?”.

OO becomes a necessity in larger projects, where the kind of procedural code that is often seen in AS2 rapidly becomes too time-consuming to maintain (as well as being far more difficult for a team of developers to collaborate on). As an aside, game development is, by it’s very nature of using discrete “objects”, “items”, and “entities”, a perfect fit for the OO approach, as any of these can be conceptualised directly as classes.

In terms of display speeds, AS3 is also capable of an speeds an order of magnitude greater than AS2 (easily more than 10x faster using certain methods).

I agree with your statements that AS2 can create by far the majority of browser games you see at the moment. But you will find that as time moves on, the status quo will be raised by what is made possible with AS3 (if only in terms of execution speed and ease of development), and as that occurs AS2 will quickly become undesirable: in fact, this is already happening, if one is only to look at the AS3 developer job market.

Regards,

-Nick