Paul Preece was a British game developer. That was, until he created Desktop Tower Defense. In two months, he developed a game that’s been played over 15 million times and brought in thousands in advertising. Paul Preece has since quit his day job and teamed up with David Litsky of FlashElementTD to run his own gaming startup.
Flash gaming site Kongregate is encouraging more people to do the same. They’ll be funding the development of five or more professional flash games and creating a set of APIs to help weekend developers more easily make multiplayer and monetize them through a micro payment system.
Kongregate is tying up a significant amount of their capital in some premium games, investing around $100,000 in each title. The cash is paid in installments as the games are developed. Kongregate hopes to make back some of the money through advertising and the traffic the games generate during their one year exclusivity agreement. They have some fairly well known developers lined up such as Chris Paisley, who created 5 minutes to kill yourself.
So far they’ve settled on five titles: Argue, Zening, Dinowaurs, Remnants of Skystone, and Lila Dreams. Each game is rather quirky. Lila Dreams, for instance, lets you play inside the head of an 11 year old girl and impact her real-world choices by affecting her emotions. Zening is the most elaborate, featuring team deathmatch multiplayer modes, two- and four-player combat, webcam support and a fully voiced narrative. All are set to release the first half of next year.
The games are meant to push forward the complexity of online flash games, of which most are programed during after work hours and many of which frankly aren’t that great. To improve flash games overall, Kongregate is developing a series of APIs that will make multiplayer and pay-per-play games easier to develop. According to Kongregate CEO Jim Greer, money from even the best flash games can top out at $10,000 from advertising, making game development a labor of love. A micro-payment system will give developers another way to monetize. With the system, players will be able to play the games for free, but also trade in pre-purchased tokens for upgrades. It’s similar to the paid upgrades currently available on sites like King.com or Cafe.com, except available to the average developer.
The payment platform also gives Kongregate another option to their advertising only business model, which relies on high traffic. At around a million uniques in October, Greer still sees a lot of room for growth toward the likes of Pogo.com or Miniclip, which he says get around 14 and 20 million uniques each month.
Kongregate have a neat feature now, where when you play a game on their site it adds a note about this to your Facebook mini-feed. Seems pretty seamless, and a very clever way to generate a bit of viral buzz on facebook about Kongregate games.
I love Kongregate.
@Graeme – Which lead to that article that was dugg very heavily about how to disable Beacon, the system facebook uses to track that
Thanks Duncan. I’d like to make a couple of clarifications. First off, $100K is the largest budget we have, average is more like $60K. The goal is for the portfolio overall to be profitable. That will depend on a couple of hits.
Also, I think there are hundreds of great flash games made for much less than $10K. Our goal with this is to seed a new category – focused on multiplayer and co-op play. If we can prove that Flash games at this scale can make money, we think more devs will self-fund them and keep more of the profits. We want to be the best platform for that, not a game publisher.
Hi Jim, I was a developer using the Garage Games SDK.
http://www.gara...e.php?qid=52582
I have no interest in writing flash games, but I do want more investment money to pay for bandwidth on our new search engine. It has nothing to do with gaming. If you have money floating around to invest, please call me so I can show you. I would like to drop a contract for a 100MBPS line for Dec1 and upgrade to a Gigabit internet line, so that should give you an idea of the investment wanted. If you have a GBPS line, I would trade you equity to use it and ship the servers to you.
@Chris R. – most inappropriate TechCrunch comment ever. Strange.
I also want to clarify — I directed and produced Five Minutes to Kill (Yourself) for AdultSwim.com. The developer and creator of that game was development studio Ham in the Fridge. I am currently the Director of Games for Kongregate and am directing the Premium Games program.
love kongregate – reason for my love is that my older son and his friends are all over this site all of the time…in their opinion(s) it blows away numerous other idle-time wasting sites and offers the freshest gameplay and most full featured games without crap downloads or browser bugginess…of course, kids are fickle, so expect it will be out of favor within six months…
@Troy, do you have a free GBPS port/line?
Kongregate is a fun site. I submit all our games there. Looking forward to playing some multi-player and co-op in the future.
Quitting your day job is hard…even if you’re already in the industry. However, it’s very satisfying to be able to work all day on an indie project you and your peers created. It was our dream, and we’re actually doing it now.
Kongregate is awesome because they give you some of the benefits that a publisher can give you, but without all the infamous nasty things publishers have a reputation for. You get to keep your IP, you get funding…this is what everyone has been screaming for.
and colgate wants you to make movies…
If your job means so little that you quit it to begin making games, then you shouldn’t have been working there to begin with.
Jon
Kongregate still seems to be growing