When I look at all other websites listed here in comments I can’t see such invitation there. Probably, I should look more carefully — but here’s the trick, I really shouldn’t look for invitation carefully If I am really invited. I believe game developers play games too, and much (huh, interesting idea for online survey). And this is supported with the Kongregate invitation at the main page.

Another strong point of their site it the reasonable design. “Featured game” block is only at Kongregate again. In general, they took the best marketing and usability features from web2 and successfully applied the ol’good firm graphic design unlike loose one from other web20 implementation. As result, their site looks innovative and familiar simultaneously. Others look a bit outdated or just usual then with their pretty plain design (despite the fact gamegardens.com has the one which looks original).

‘Hand made, powered by wires’ — here’s the core of their fast success.

Here’s the quotation from my friend Sergey ‘Syo’ Krivosheya from Kiev, whose games featured at the main page of Kongregate at the moment:

“…I have uploaded the couple of games in the evening. When I’ve woke up in the morning, I saw games was played by a lot of people. They write reasonable and very useful comments. Disregarding money, Kongregate website is great platform for testing game ideas w/out without any extra effort indeed…”

I wish Kongregate be the #1

Timing is good as indie developers are struggling to stay afloat in the “established” casual game channels. Most of the large distribution portals don’t share ad revenue, the market is cluttered with tons ‘o clones, downloadable conversion rates are sucky, and infrastructure for micro-transaction revenue either doesn’t exist or isn’t accessible to indie developers.

Gotta love disruptive media. Good luck to Kongregate, Prazzy, Pijo, etc.

We are planning to redesign, introduce our global membership backend and then go live next week.

http://www.prazzy.com

Firstly, please don’t tag this as spam – This is relevant to the topic is discussion as Kongregate and pjio are spoken about in the game topics on many forums.

A heads up on an alternative that is currently in live beta that you can all have a look at today, heck even upload your game if you wish.

http://www.pjio.com

We’re not limiting ourselves to Flash or Java, in fact our tech enables virtually any game to be wrapped and delivered as a web game and embedded in any webpage. The beta has been live for 2 days now and the visitor count is already off the scale!

Please come along, bear in mind it’s beta, and have some fun.

Not yet…just requested one!

Yes, I’m pretty familiar with the problem from Pogo, but it will be even worse on our site with a younger more savvy audience.

In general there’s not much you can do against people who run ‘bots’, typically little visual basic apps that read the screen and click madly on your game. The only defense there is statistical – i.e. this person is making progress in this game faster than a human could, or is playing 18 hours straight, etc.

Our basic philosophy is to give most points for contributing to the site in ways that only people can (suggesting games, inviting friends, etc – even on these we need to be aware of gamesmanship).

For high scores, we’re going to do this the way many online services do – we don’t have a global high score list. Instead the high score list compares you with your friends.

How much thought have you given to cheaters? Once you start keeping track of points and ranking players you are going to have problems with them.