Chrome Disables Unity and Shockwave Plugin

If you are here because the game you were trying to play displayed the following message “This plugin is not supported” or it ask you to install plugin player when you already have it. This is because with the latest update of Google Chrome (version 42), they no longer support Unity Player, Shockwave Player, and many others. You can still play the game in two ways.

The first way is the easiest, simply switch to Firefox.

The second way is by typing “ chrome://flags/ ” (without the quotes) into the chrome address field, where the url goes. Then search for the text “Enable NPAPI”, which should be the 10th row from the top. Click “enable” below it. It’ll then ask you to relaunch Google Chrome. Click “Relaunch Now”. Now you’ll be able to play unity games on every site using Chrome. But don’t get too excited because this method only work temporarily. Sometime in September Google will release Chrome version 45 that’ll remove NPAPI support permanently. Which mean you’ll have to play old unity games on other browsers. Newer unity games made with Unity 5 will be able to export using WebGL, which will work for Chrome.

Google’s reason for their decision is explained by “Unity’s and Shockwave plugin relies on the old Netscape Plug-in API NPAPI’s 90s-era architecture has become a leading cause of hangs, crashes, security incidents, and code complexity. Because of this, Chrome will be phasing out NPAPI support.”

Hope that explains it. This will definitely affect the entire online gaming community. Many of the new indie games in the last couple of years has been made by developers using the Unity game engine.