Kongregate’s New ‘Blocks’ Feature Is A Disaster
Kongregate is a site that has always been close to my heart. Since I was a kid, I’ve played hundreds of games on the site over the years, had some great interactions with the community and submitted some games of my own for the site’s monthly game jam. Which meant I was even more disappointed by Kong’s latest feature: Blocks. This isn’t new. It’s a wider problem that’s been building up on Kong for a while, but I’ll get to that later. What are blocks? And what exactly is the problem with them?
Blocks are the biggest new feature Kong has seen in a long, long time. They’ve even been added to the main menu bar at the top of the site which previously hadn’t seen a change in years. By earning Badge Of The Day’s(or BOTD’s for short), Kongpanions, completing challenges and a few other things you can earn blocks as a reward. These blocks can be spent on three different things: Stickers, Badge Bounties and Promoted Listings. The first is the most relevant for the majority of Kong’s community. Stickers are more or less emotes that you can use in chat rooms to express yourself. I’ll be honest, I like this idea. Along with badges, Kong’s chat rooms have always been an important part of the site and one of the main reasons people visit it in the first place. Heck, there are several ‘games’ that don’t have any ‘game’ to them and exist solely for people to access Kong’s chat rooms.
The other two ideas don’t seem bad at a glance either. Badge Bounties allow you to place blocks on a badge on one of your games. When players earn this badge, they receive a block reward for their efforts. Promoted Listings are more or less advertisements you don’t have to pay for. Allegedly you can use up a certain number of blocks to advertise your game on one of Kongregate’s pages for a set amount of time up to a week, including the front page. This seems like a great idea. Kongregate has been criticised heavily for not promoting new games that deserve a chance and just letting them rot out of sight for the most part. But you may have noticed that I said ‘allegedly’ earlier. And this is where the problems start.
The launch of this new ‘Blocks’ feature has been a mess, and proves that Kong are still pretty incompetent. A few days ago, the feature was launched along with a challenge to collect a certain number of ‘Doeos’ in the classic game Doeo to earn 20 blocks. People flocked to this game in an attempt to complete the challenge and earn some blocks. But, to put it simply, it didn’t work. Something about the new blocks completely broke Kong’s API. People were collecting thousands of Doeo’s, well above the 1000 required for the challenge and still not completing the challenge or receiving their reward. Okay, but that’s not a huge deal. It’s a challenge so there are several days to complete it, and they’ll surely fix it by the time the challenge ends right?
Well this is where it gets really bad. The subsequent day, the first BOTD with a block reward was launched. It also didn’t work for a lot of people. The next one as well. And the next. Now we’re on almost an entire week of Block BOTD’s and it’s still breaking for a LOT of people. The fact that Kong hasn’t fixed this by now is completely ridiculous. It also doesn’t help that blocks are completely useless currently. For some reason Kong thought it’d be a great idea to launch blocks without any sticker packs to spend them on. Which leaves only the two game promotion features, which are only useful to developers. No, not only useful to developers. Only useful to certain select developers. Myself and many other Kongregate developers don’t actually have access to the feature yet. Which means Kongregate broke their API to launch a new currency which is as of yet useless to the vast majority of the playerbase. Great move Kong!
There’s also still a lot of debate about how much the badge bounties and promoted listings will actually help. Badge bounties are a cool idea and all, but only very successful games even get badges in the first place. The only people that can use badge bounties are the people that need them the least. Promoted Listings seem great at first but will they really be effective? I’ve spoken to several people who actually have access to the Promoted Listings feature and the prices seem questionable at best. Allegedly, you can get 7 days on the front page for only 840 blocks and promotions in other places go as low as a few dozen blocks. This seems way too low when you consider the fact that myself and many other long time players on Kongregate got several thousand blocks right off the bat. With my current blocks, I can get ten 7 day front page promotions. You can get 20 blocks a day just from doing the BOTD, that is assuming it actually works. With the prices so low, wouldn’t the promoted listings just turn into a battle royale where everyone cancels each other out?
This isn’t the first time Kong has failed to listen to its community and address their concerns however. Remember Kartridge? I thought not. Kong’s would-be Steam competitor came out of nowhere and then vanished just as fast. Back when it was first announced, Kongregate community members including many I know personally were more than willing to give them feedback. But Kong ignored them and vainly thought they knew better. Kartridge hasn’t seen an update in over a year now, and barely any games are still being published on it. I was involved in porting the first commercial game I worked on(Retro Vaders Reloaded) to Kartridge not too long ago and we planned to implement leaderboards through Kartridge’s API as we did with Steam’s. But no matter where I looked, I couldn’t find anything on it. An email inquiring about it yielded the sad but far from shocking truth. They had planned to add the feature later on, but had since ‘truncated’ their roadmap and had no further plans to add it.
While nothing has been said publicly about Kartridge’s failure, everyone knows it to be the case. That may be why Kongregate’s Monthly Contests ended a couple of months ago, another nail in the coffin. These contests gave the developers of the top rated games of the month fairly hefty cash prizes and were one of the biggest sources of income for Kongregate’s developers. There was lots of controversy over it being abused and now rather than fix it, Kong have removed it entirely citing ‘ongoing economic realities’. All this among talks of how Kong, unlike Newgrounds and other sites, doesn’t have any plans to save the games on their site once Flash is discontinued later this year.
It pains me to say it, but Kongregate’s monthly contests may not be the only thing going the way of the dodo. If they don’t turn things around soon, the entire site may be the next to go. Despite my criticisms, I’m hoping that after these hurdles are overcome, blocks will breathe new life into Kongregate and its community. Hopefully, this will be the last roadblock(I’m sorry) Kong faces before they’re able to set things right.
