Another YouTube for games
This one is Kongregate,
which is founded by someone I worked with a very very long time ago for two weeks. 😉 We overlapped at the very beginnings of UO, back at Origin. I’ve been following it for a little while, but he came out of the woodwork today when he saw I had blogged pjio.com, to extend an invite to readers of this blog:
Hi all –
I founded a startup called Kongregate doing something related. We think Flash is already a great tool for making games, and we’re concentrating on building community features and a metagame to tie together what people upload.
We just launched a private alpha 3 weeks ago, and as of this morning we have 43 games – a lot of them are really great ones, too. We’ve just expanded our server capacity, and have room for a bunch of new players, so if you’re interested come to http://kongregate.com and request an invitation. We’ll get one to you within an hour or two.
We’ll also be supporting Shockwave games soon and Java a little later on. We give a share of the revenue we make to the game developer – up to 50% depending on whether they implement our APIs and whether the game is exclusive to us.
Game developers will also be able to use our 1-click payment system to charge for premium content in their games. For instance you could have a racing game where the first 3 tracks are free, and then additional tracks are $0.50 each or $5 for all of them. The price is up to the developer – here the revenue share will be much higher than 50% – it’s your game after all.
One cool thing we’re doing that isn’t implemented yet is a metagame. By playing the individual Flash games you can earn “Cards” – sort of like Achievements on Xbox Live. Those cards are playable in an online collectible card game, think Magic the Gathering.
A lot of this isn’t implemented yet, but you can check out the basics now. We’re really trying to get feedback from developers to make sure we’re implementing the right set of features and making a site that will be the best place to upload web games.
12 Responses to “Another YouTube for games”
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First of all, it needs to play nice with the older version of Mozilla I have on this computer. 🙂
Now this sounds like it’s on the right track. A bit ambitious, so who knows how it’ll turn out, but the ideas behind it are much closer to creating the true “youtube of games.”
Hope to be playing around with it soon!
Sweet.
Hey StGabe –
Sorry about that, what version do you have? We sacrificed some backwards compatiability for CSS/standards-adherence.
[…] Comments […]
Ah, good, more innovative thinking coming to the space.
Jim, I’ve registered (of course), but had a question I wanted to ask before I forgot 🙂
Do you allow anyone to just post a game they created even if they don’t enter into a financial revenue-sharing arrangement with your company? Just wanted to know how close to YouTube this was versus, say, Addictinggames or Miniclips.
Darniag – Yes, as soon as you post the game, it’s live on the site. The rev share is standard for all developers, so there’s no arrangement to make.
Quick heads up, Flash games are now fully supported on pjio.com – Flash developers get same ad-share as other developers and same exposure.
I tagged it to add to our links section at launch….nice stuff
pijo.com points to a domain parking site now. =/
The correct link is pjio.com.
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