Kongregate: A Post-mortem
Well, it looks like I was right, as much as I hate to say it. It was only a couple of weeks ago that I wrote an article criticising Kongregate’s new Blocks feature. I finished off the article with the conclusion that if something didn’t change soon, Kongregate might not be much longer for this world. I expected this. I predicted it would happen. And yet, it isn’t any easier. The announcement is still shocking. There’s still some kind of hole in my heart. Maybe I hoped that despite all the warning signs, Kongregate would get through this and recover. Kongregate and its community have been an important part of my life for a long time, but it won’t be there anymore.
Let’s step back a bit. What happened? Well, to the surprise of everyone, Kongregate announced in a forum post yesterday that Kong is more or less being shut down. And when I say “to the surprise of everyone”, I mean literally everyone. Several staff members including one I know personally and the famed “Greg” were laid off without any warning. Some of them made forum posts talking about future badges and updates mere hours before they found out. Honestly, the way in which staff members were laid off like disposable tissues makes me sick to my stomach.
The site won’t be going anywhere, for the time being anyway, but it may as well be. All the features that made Kong special and stand out from the crowd are more or less being removed. Chat rooms, except those for certain games, are being removed on July 22nd. Most of the forums are being deleted or going into read-only mode. Badges will no longer be added to games. The community was what made Kongregate what it was, and without these features, it won’t be any different from your run-of-the-mill web games portal. And on top of all that, new games can no longer be uploaded. Kong is doomed to a slow and painful death with these changes. So today, I’d like to take a step back and talk about everything that led to this happening. I’d like to expand on what I touched on in my Blocks article and give some context to Kongregate’s fall from grace.
Gone In A Flash
If you asked the average person why they think Kongregate is dying, they’d probably respond with the same answer when asked about other web gaming portals: “Adobe is ending support for Flash”. To be honest, it’s hard to argue. Adobe Flash was a juggernaut when it came to web games and there was a time when you’d be hard-pressed to find a game that wasn’t made in it. It’s one of the main reasons web portals like Newgrounds thrived in the early 2000’s and it was a big blow for web games when its discontinuation was announced. But that also begs the question: Why didn’t Kongregate do more?
Newgrounds created their own Flash Player that would be able to play all their games even after Flash loses support. Other people like BlueMaxima have been working on projects like Flashpoint to help prevent Flash games from being lost forever. Kong could easily create their own extension to play all their Flash games and even profit from it. But it seems Kong decided to stay in blissful ignorance and didn’t make any plans for the end of Flash.
Even with Flash gone, it wouldn’t be the end. It would have had a negative impact for sure, but it wouldn’t stop everyone playing Flash games on Kongregate. Extensions like SuperNova SWF Enabler still allow Flash games to be played even once it has been discontinued. On top of that, there’s been a shift towards WebGL games for a while now, even before Flash’s announcement. This means that there will still be plenty of games on Kongregate users will be able to play without difficulty even after December 2020. While Flash is clearly a factor in this recent decision and the decline of web portals, I think there are more to consider that arguably had a bigger effect.
Kartridge Blows
If you asked me what the I think is the biggest reason for this decision, I’d say Kartridge. What is Kartridge? Well, it was Kongregate’s attempt at making a Steam competitor around the time everybody was trying to make a Steam competitor. Before I tear into it, I want to say that Kartridge did have some good ideas. The layout and design is really nice, store pages are more customisable than Steams and the badge system where you can earn tokens from completing badges in games that could be spent on game discounts and even buying full games was really cool. But Kartridge was just lacking in so many other areas.
For a start, it doesn’t have achievements like Steam does. I understand that they might have thought it a bit much along with badges, but they could have had achievements and badges separate with only badges giving tokens for discounts and free games. Games don’t have community hubs and most don’t have chat rooms. Profile Customisation and social features such as friends lists are more or less non-existent. Compared to platforms like Steam it was inferior in almost every way. One of my good friends put it quite well: “You can’t try and compete with steam and have less features”.
I get what they were trying to go for. In the aftermath of criticisms levelled at Steam for lacking discoverability and marketability for smaller titles, they wanted to appeal to small Indie devs. They aimed for a better curated store, one where lesser-known Indie devs could shine and stand out. But for that to work you need to have an audience to begin with, and with so little in the way of features for players, whatever audience Kartridge had evaporated pretty quickly. The last patch notes for Kartridge were over a year ago and an email that was sent while we were porting Retro Vaders to Kartridge confirmed they’d truncated their roadmap and some features would never see the light of day. Although it hasn’t been confirmed yet, it’s almost certain Kartridge was a failure and will also be announced to be shutting down soon.
A Chip Off The Old Block
The recent announcement is even more surprising when you realise that Kongregate released their biggest new feature in years only a couple of weeks beforehand. Blocks were released to a ton of fanfare that quickly turned into confusion and anger. A ‘marketplace’ page where you could spend them on stickers, a currency counter on the user menu, several additions to the dropdown menus and even a new badge filter that allowed you to find badges with Block Bounties. It was hardly a small footnote. It probably took a lot of hard work on a site that hadn’t seen a redesign in over half a decade.
Which might be why the feature broke the website’s “Badge of the Day”, a daily event where you can earn points to level up by earning a specific badge that was usually randomly selected. Hundreds, if not thousands of people came to the site almost every day to earn these. And now they weren’t able to, even if they had earned the badge before it was Badge of the Day. Players flooded the comments, complaining that the badge didn’t work. You’d think with it being such a big issue, it would be fixed pretty quickly. But it wasn’t. For almost a week. And on top of that, there was no real purpose for Blocks. There were no stickers available at the time and there still isn’t. Only devs had any real use for them and most of them including myself didn’t have access to the feature for some unexplained reason or other.
This highlights a bigger problem with Kongregate in its final years as a whole. There just seemed to be a disconnect with Kongregate and its userbase. Heck, it seemed sometimes that Kongregate had a disconnect with Kongregate. In what world did releasing a new feature that was unfinished, untested and had no purpose yet make sense? Whenever Kong’s userbase tried to point out the issues and mistakes with the platform, they put their hands over their ears and ignored them. A website is nothing without its users, and over time, more and more left the platform for good because of a lack of improvement.
Wasted Potential
Finally I’d like to talk about one other factor that led to not just Kong’s fall, but might very well lead to the fall of other web portals like Newgrounds: lack of innovation. Kongregate’s mistakes may have been bad, but they could never move past them because they didn’t improve or change. Years went by without any significant changes to the way Kong did things, and if the site stays stagnant for too long, people will lose interest. Kong’s benefits will become less significant and its problems more significant.
For as long as I’ve been on the site, Kongregate has used a rating system. You can rate games from 1 stars to 5 and the site encourages you to after playing one for a certain amount of time. It also rewards you with 1 point which is kind of like EXP to increase your site level. The problem with this system is that there’s nothing to stop exploitation. There’s nothing to stop someone rating a game before it has even loaded. There was much discussion among fellow Kong Developers I know about how a popular Kong developer kept releasing his games near the end of the month right before the monthly contests ended and encouraging his fans to rate 5 before they played. This allowed him to keep winning the monthly contests before his game’s ratings levelled out and obtain the cash prizes through what could be considered underhanded tactics. Kongregate did nothing to address or solve this issue for years and developers grew more and more weary of the problem over time. They could have done any number of things such as preventing players from rating the game until they play for a certain amount of time or implementing some kind of Newgrounds system where the ratings of long time users have more weighting.
Any new features Kongregate did add were a waste of potential, at least in my opinion. One of the biggest examples of this is Kongpanions. These were a big deal when they first came out. Cute pets you could earn every week by doing the Badge of the Days. You could even use them in games! Only two specific games made by Kong but surely more would come! They never did. Only a handful of games and a few ‘tools’ such as an Avatar Maker actually implemented them. People earned Kongpanions only to not really be able to do anything with them. Most of this can be attributed to Kong not really having any sort of plan for them.
Talking to a few devs it becomes obvious why not many people wanted to implement them into their games. Each Kongpanion has several tags describing them but there’s no real rhyme or reason to them. Organising them into any sort of list and implementing them into a game’s systems was difficult and not really worth the effort. Kongpanions, despite only being static images were inconsistent and difficult to categorise. Even Kongregate itself didn’t want to do anything with them after their initial release.
But they could have been so much more. Imagine a Kongpanion cock fight game where you pit your Kongpanions against other player’s Kongpanions in a fight to the death! Imagine a Trading Card Game where each Kongpanion is its own card with its own special effect! Or what about a digital pet game like Tamagochi? This opens up tons of avenues for monetisation. I’m sure more than a few people would be willing to spend a few dollars on sunglasses or a similar cosmetic for their Kongpanions. Maybe I’m underestimating the work required but anything would have been better than introducing them only to abandon them and never update them again almost straight afterwards.
Back when web portals were first becoming popular, they were new and exciting for both developers and players. Developers could release their game and people would come to play it even if it lacked advertising, giving them decent ad money in the process. Players could access a seemingly infinite catalogue of games that were more or less all available for free. Many developers such as Matt Roszak got their start on these websites and are now hugely successful because of it.
But times change. Early 2000’s Newgrounds and early 2010’s Kongregate are eras that I don’t think we’ll ever be able to experience again. Many developers and players would rather go to Steam or Itch.io or the App Store nowadays, and that’s because the world has evolved and left web portals like Kongregate behind. Despite Kong’s death, I still have a vain hope that we’ll see a resurgence of web portals someday. I still have a vain hope that someone will see the mistakes Kong and other web portals made and create a successor that can survive in the modern age. But until and if that happens, all I can do is mourn and talk about where it all went wrong. Rest in peace Kongregate.
