GameGum: YouTube for games #27,462
(Visited 10454 times) Game talk
Feb 052007
Nate Wienert alerts me to his project GameGum, another “YouTube for Games” site. It’s been around for a year, aggregates Flash games, and most interestingly, does revenue sharing with those who upload games by splitting the AdSense revenue from a given game’s earnings. Up to 50% can go to the most popular games. The suite of community tools seems fairly complete: ratings, reviews, favorites, and so on. The now-ubiquitous Digg-like “fresh list” is right there on the front page.
At this point, the whole Flash game sharing site thing seems to me to be getting a little crowded. 🙂 What’s interesting to me is that so many of these seem able to sustain a viable community.
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[IMG Raph Koster]The merging of the game world and the world world continues. As industry expert Raph Koster notes on his blog, “GameGum is another ‘YouTube for Games’ site. It’s been around for a year, aggregates Flash games, and most interestingly, does revenue sharing with those who upload games by splitting the AdSense revenue from a given game’s earnings. Up to 50% can go
How Many “YouTubes for Games” are There? Posted by Jim Greer Tue, 06 Feb 2007 16:16:00 GMT Raph Koster’s posted yesterday about GameGum: At this point, the whole Flash game sharing site thing seems to me to be getting a little crowded. 🙂 What’s interesting to me is that so many of these seem able to sustain a viable community.
Oh dear, I’m worried that my first thought when I saw the page design was “this looks like one of those domain squatting sites”. It’s covered in text ads, the design is all over the place and mostly looks like a big page of links. I’m not sure I like what digg/del.icio.us have done for web design, much as I like their central concept.
@Chocorisu
Going to have to agree with you, gamegum seems like a nice site though (I bookmarked it).
I guess most PHP/AJAX/2.0 designers dont know that CSSzengarden is thier friend…:)
I like this site – well designed and easy to use. 50% of AdSense is not much, though. No one clicks on text ads next to games.
As for it being the 27,462nd YouTube for games, I’d point out that Digg, Flickr, MySpace, WoW, and many others entered crowded fields and won people over because they did something better. And really, how large a field are we talking about Raph?
There’s NewGrounds, the grand-daddy and a great site, but pretty confusing for a newcomer who just wants to play some games. Their redesign will probably address this.
There’s Pjio. Well, there was for a while, but they’ve been closed for redesign since December, so the jury is still out (I don’t get why redesign requires closing the site btw).
There’s AddictingGames, but I wouldn’t call that a YouTube, even though you can upload a game. They are all individually screened by AG employees before going on the site. They have to be, since there’s no ratings system to separate the good from the bad (or to flag pornography, copyright infringment, etc). There’s no comments, profiles, or forums. In fact there’s no way to interact with other players at all. Not that it’s not a good site! It does a great job of being streamlined and simple to use, and has a very good selection of games.
There’s the GreatGamesExperient, but you can’t actually play games on that site as far as I’ve seen – it’s more a social networking site where you can rate games, talk about games, show off the games you’ve made. In that sense it’s like Flixter crossed with MobyGames.
And then there’s our site, Kongregate. Which is awesome of course! Seriously, I think we are trying to do something different by focusing on community. We’re trying to bring the features of XBox Live or Pogo to user-uploaded games. Chat, rankings, achievements, points (aka gamerscore or tokens). To me, these are things that got Pogo to 1.3 million+ paying (March 06), and Xbox Live to 4 million (October 06). We’ve got some of our own wrinkles on the way, like the metagame, a microtransaction system that developers can use to charge for premium content in their games, etc.
There probably isn’t a niche for all these sites, but there’s probably room for quite a few. Obviously we’ll all be competing like crazy to be the best, which is good news for both players and developers.
@Jim
“I don’t get why redesign requires closing the site btw”
That very much depends on the designer (if in house and not hired out)
and resources available.
I like that there are so many indie game designers on so many sites trying new things, sometimes I happen across something like maidmarion or something and get completely hooked. What would be nice is if maybe some of these larger sites got together and developed a universal sign up and login….sining up for a new site every time…not so fun.
That would be nice – not just for games sites, but everywhere. OpenID is trying to do that, but it isn’t getting much traction so far.
Thanks Raph, I appreciate you posting on this and I also appreciate the comments here.
@Jim – I am a fan of Kongregate, I like that you are working towards better integration with the games themselves as well as some of the other social things you are developing. I also agree that there will always be room for those who can develop something new/better/easier/etc. In the broad niche, we are incredibly crowded. But as far as a forward thinking, developer and user focused community, I think there is plenty of room.
As far as 50% not being much, it depends on the size of the site. As we grow, there are a few different strategies we have looked towards in order to generate the most revenue, which means the most revenue for our community to share with us. Right now, text ads are the most profitable means, and in time we will most likely begin serving various other forms of advertisements.
I think at this point we are mostly working on a seamless community. Everything on the site is 100% in-house and custom development, even the forum and private message system. This allows us to pretty rapidly make changes, and we do so very often (at least once a week, lately its been daily).
At the moment we have a new suggestion thread where we are asking the community to help brainstorm what they want in the community. We hope to continue doing these sorts of things, including sponsoring games and offering contests.
I think there’s room. Look at how we’ve got Popcap, RealArcade, Reflexive, Big Fish, Oberon, AracdeTown, Yahoo Games, etc. etc.
I think what the indie game industry is missing is how YouTube-style game websites have the potential to compete with — and potentially disrupt — the Popcaps and RealArcades of the world. From a developer’s standpoint, if a site like Kongregate can get a lot of eyeballs looking at their game, and the developer can collect 100% (minus credit card fees) of the full-version purchase price if the gamer decides to buy, and you don’t need to sign a contract to get published, and you can put as many URLs in your game as you want … why even bother splitting revenue with RealArcade?
I’ve written more about this here:
Kongregate: a potential disruptive indie game publisher
first of all, got to say Kongregate simply rocks in terms of UI and clarity of interface, extremely well done.
However it seems GameGum has a better chance to be the strategic winner. They got both key youtube components right: platform to receive user content, platform to share/server user content *in any place on the web*. Kongregate is only half: user created content, walled garden afterwards. terms like “15% exclusives” clearly hint that is strategy decision not an an incident. so its more of “pogo with user uploaded games”. nice, yet at the end of the day it just one more destination site with flash games.
i think whoever becomes THE destination to host/get/embed/share/etc/etc for flash games will be the big winner here.
Max –
There are a ton of sites that give you the javascript to embed a game on your site. It is a very easy feature to implement. The issue is whether the uploader of the game intended it to be displayed on other sites. We want to avoid people uploading their game to Kong and then being surprised to see it on MySpace.
There also doesn’t seem to be a lot of demand for this feature. Miniclip and AddictingGames are both enormous, and both feature the embed code right on the page. But there aren’t too many MySpace pages with games on them…