After receiving a $3 million funding infusion last week, the gaming platform website Kongregate is now prepared to move into the wonderful world of social networking. Already Kongregate is a bit of a hybrid animal, featuring a blend of gaming and social networking, but now it is going to move into the Facebook market trying to steal precious hours away from students (and duplicitous marketers) everywhere.
Kongregate will be announcing its presence through the Kongregate Facebook Challenge application, which will allow Facebook users to challenge their friends to beat their scores on a choice of nine different Flash games. Kongregate plans to expand the game offering in the future. 1up had a chance to see some of the early games:
Greer gave us a walkthrough of a couple of early games on the site’s new Facebook extension. We got to check out a simple game titled Particles in which your mouse cursor is replaced by a red ball and you score points by dodging other balls. The game allowed us to challenge any Facebook friends who were on or offline, but the challenge play was score-based rather than simultaneous. It was enjoyable, but we couldn’t help but hope that more complex Kongregate games like Sonny also get their time to shine in the social networking arena.
As for what differentiates Kognregate as a platform, CEO Jim Greer had this to say:
“There are sites that are already making a lot of money on Flash games, but typically the way the deals work is that they’ll just license a game for $500 or $1,000 and that’s all the money the developer ever gets out of that deal. What we do is as soon as you upload your game, you start earning a share of the ad revenue. It starts off at 25%. We’re very open about how many hits your game got, here’s the impressions we’re getting, here’s your percentage. If you integrate our API [application programming interface] for reporting events and statistics, achievements, high scores, and all that, that goes to 30%. You can get that up to 50% if you make the game exclusive to our site — that is, only on Kongregate and the developer’s site — or if you sponsor your game and put a link and logo to Kongregate when you upload it to other sites.”
With the incredibly popular Desktop Tower Defense already stealing the productive hours of our youths, the debut on Facebook will open up these popular “hardcore” Flash games to a much wider audience. The real question for Kongregate is whether they will be able to negotiate the classic problem of Facebook applications: how do you get users of your Facebook app to leave Facebook for your own website? As Kongregate really has some fun games, I wish Greer the best of luck in solving this conundrum.
Leave a Reply