We already had HeyZap, the “YouTube for Flash games” and Game Curry, a search engine for Flash games, so not that much of a surprise we now have a “Ning for Flash games” that lets anyone create a gaming website much like Marc Andreessen’s service does the same for social networking sites.
Danish startup / gaming community Nonoba is taking a crack at just that by launching GameRise, a CMS that supposedly makes developing and maintaining customized gaming sites a breeze. The comparison to Ning – and by extension the plethora of similar services – comes from co-founder Oliver Pedersen but isn’t all that far-fetched.
GameRise allows users, from amateurs to professional developers, to create and maintain sites featuring game catalogs and social services like chat rooms and forums as well as the ability to customize the look and feel, advertising displays and language of the community websites.
The content for most user generated content sites is pretty easy to make. Just shoot a photo for Flickr or record a video for YouTube. But when it comes to the user generated games on Kongregate, you’ll need to acquire some basic programming skills before contributing anything.
Instead of relying on its users to go out and buy O’Reilly books on Flash development, the two-year-old startup has put together a series of tutorials for a new section of its site called Kongregate Labs. The tutorials (nine planned but only three available today) hold your hand throughout the entire process of creating a spaceship game – from downloading Flash CS3 for the first time to adding advanced power up and boss elements. At each step of the way, you can play the game as it should be played (and how it should function if you’ve following the directions closely).
InstantAction is a GarageGames project focused on bringing free high-quality games to the browser.
Like Kongregate, InstantAction is highly social and quickly accessible. Both sites appeal to casual gamers who don’t want to install software or learn complex user controls before competing with friends or strangers in short rounds of play. InstantAction, however, differentiates itself from Kongregate and other casual gaming sites by delivering impressive 3D graphics with a proprietary plugin.
Ever since we first covered InstantAction in March, that plugin (and therefore its three available games) has only been available to Windows users. But GarageGames has been hard at work on a Mac plugin, and it’s almost ready for release to the public.
Until then, the first 100 Mac readers to email this address will gain access to the Mac private beta so they can play Marble Blast, Think Tanks, and Rokkit Ball (all involving the firing, rolling, or passing of balls in some manner) against PC and Mac users alike.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has invested $3 million into user-generated casual gaming site Kongregate through Bezos Expeditions, his personal investment vehicle. Kongregate CEO calls it a “super angel round,” although technically it is a B1 round (the startup raised $5 million in a round led by Greylock). Bezos Expeditions won’t be taking a board seat. Greer says:
If we had done another venture round, we would have had to raise $12 million to $15 million [to satisfy current the target equity stake that would be required by new VC investors]. We don’t need that to get to profitability. We still have $6 million in the bank of what we’ve raised so far, including Bezos’ money.
He really didn’t need the money, but when Jeff Bezos wants to invest in your a startup on good terms, you’d be crazy to say no. (LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, also an investor in Kongregate, made the introduction to Bezos). Greer says the process was very efficient. He flew up to Seattle and had one meeting with Bezos and his investment team. Greer explains why he thinks Bezos invested:
He looked at it the way he looks at the Amazon seller business. Amazon is a better place to sell your stuff than on your own site, and Kongregate is a better place to host your games. Community is really important. He said you should really consider developers your customers to the same extent that you consider players your customers. That was his big emphasis.
Kongregate lets anyone create their own Flash video games and splits revenues with game creators, starting at 25 percent of any associated advertising, up to 50 percent. ComScore shows 1.7 million global unique visitors in March (see chart below), with the average user spending 82 minutes per month on the site. (The company claims 3 million worldwide uniques and 349,000 registered hardcore users). The video above is one we shot of Greer at the Crunchies awards earlier this year, explaining what Kongregate does. (The figures he cites at the end of video of 2800 games and 1.5 million visitors are outdated, and now would be 4,200 and 3 million respectively, on an apples-to-apples basis. And only 63 million games have been played in total, not the half a billion he states in the video).
Still number one social networking destination MySpace has entered the casual flash games market with games.myspace.com.
The new site won’t win any awards for innovation, indeed it looks like a < $100 template buy from Digitalpoint, but ultimately that doesn't make a difference. Casual flash gaming combined with a youngish user base in the millions makes this a no-brainer in terms of going to be a success for MySpace. The only question is whether it will cut into similar sites that also offer flash gaming. It's certainly not in Kongregate territory yet, but there are plenty of smaller players with very similar looking sites and games. (Having said that, the first game offered on the site is Desktop Tower Defense, so maybe it is slightly higher up the tree).
Games.myspace.com offers a variety of multiplayer and single player games. A link can be found to the service from the front page of MySpace.
We’ve covered a variety of casual gaming sites before on TechCrunch. It’s a hot vertical, particular since the rise of the Nintendo’s Wii console proved that there was a huge willing market for games that don’t need a 4 hour long instruction session from a gaming geek.
South Korean company NHN comes with strong credentials. The company is claimed to be the be “the leading internet company” in its home market and has a huge gaming presence in Japan and China, with the company claiming 170 million registered gamers in China. Its US arm NHN USA Inc launched the ijji.com gaming portal in 2006, and since this time its grown to high levels, with Alexa counting the site at 580, but notably 256th spot in the US (yes yes, Alexa cant be trusted etc.., but sites don’t get this high on Alexa without some traffic).
Ijji.com offers a variety of games including traditional titles such as Poker and Chess, and then site specific games including a warfare game by the name of Soldier Front, a shooter called Gunz and a couple of other games. I’d read about their driving game “Drift City” on Something Awful this weekend so this was my starting point.
Casual Gaming
Most people would presume that casual gaming would equate to quick to play, but with Drift City the word casual is someone’s idea of a joke. First up was the site telling me that I needed to be using IE 7 to play the game (no mention of Windows, but that’s a given), so I switched across to a virtual machine running Windows to get started.
The next hurdle: a 700mb + download. Why you need IE7 when the game runs on its own software is beyond me. Ijji.com also scrimps on a decent server to handle downloads; I may only have a 2mb cable connection but the 700mb took nearly 4 hours to download via a Windows installer program that gave no indication of download speeds or how long it would take. The only option on the download was to turn off P2P sharing, which warns you that if you turn it off your download will be slower, how wasn’t explained but it never takes me that long to download something off BitTorrent for example so perhaps others weren’t using this option.
Then there is a number of screens during installation, and it attempts to install something called XFire, a gamers communication device that isn’t necessary for the game, I hit cancel on this one and finally got to the game itself.
Game play
This is a free game so you wouldn’t expect top level graphics, and you don’t get them. It feels a little bit like the classic arcade game Outrun, which if you’re old enough to remember the game isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
You start with a standard car which you can drive around a city scape which is apparently on some sort of mining focused island in the North Pacific (I tuned out during the intro screens). Like say Second Life or similar virtual worlds you can communicate with other members. Driving itself is as hard as using your arrow keys, and all cars are automatic so there’s no gear shifting. Control gives your car “boost” powered which as the name suggests makes the car go faster, and SHIFT allows you to drift around corners ala The Fast and the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift.
Beginners are presented with tasks that involve driving to one point, picking up an item (by driving over the target area) then returning to base. You do this in an environment which is rich with other users and computer controlled cars as well. Half the fun is driving into other users and things, although you lose “boost” power by doing so.
After getting past a certain point, users can upgrade their cars, change colors and take on new tasks such as special deliveries, goals that earn you money for upgrades etc..
At this point you also have the ability to race other members. The social side of the game allows you to join with other members in teams and participate together. Races offer a variety of challenges other different courses.
Overall
It took me soo long to actually get to the point of having Drift City running that I was prepared to rip shreds into the game and NHN for it, but having eventually got online and played Drift City for a while I actually enjoyed it. It’s not going to appeal to a generation raised on cutting edge computer gaming but for those a little older (and the installation process aside) it’s a bit of casual fun.
Is it however the future of casual gaming? Ijji.com’s offering are a step above the true online casual gaming offered by startups such as Kongregate, but they’re got a much lower barrier to entry than say Second Life or Project Entropia. Many of the low graphics (mostly 2D) virtual worlds such as Club Penguin and Habbo Hotel target kids (and usually girls) where as Ijji.com has an older masculine target audience and offer games that don’t require an ongoing presence or commitment to succeed. If Alexa can be believed this isn’t the future of casual gaming, it’s the now of casual online gaming, and it will likely find a growing audience.
The following video was put together by Something Awful (who rated the game -27), it doesn’t give the full gist of the game but like any Something Awful video it has its moments.
Freewebs is taking a step back from its personal website network and expanding into a social media portfolio company under the name Webs.com. The domain will serve as a hub for its new web properties, including recently launched social publishing site Pagii and Freewebs. The site will also include a new property, the “Social Gaming Network” (SGN).
SGN is a game developer that builds applications for social networks. Currently, they’re making games just for Facebook, although Open Social integration seems a no-brainer. Their games include Warbook, Super Snake, Street Race, and Blocky, as well as their recently purchased Fight Club (for an undisclosed sum). You can add each of the games to your profile like any other app, which turns out to be a bit of a pain. I’ve started glossing over the Facebook permissions checklist. Each of the games is a decent way to waste away your work day on Facebook, but Blocky took up the most of my time.
The new network makes a lot of sense. In essence, Webs is doing what other casual gaming services like Kongregate and King.com are already doing off the site, but using an existing social network instead of building one. The games leverage the network in varying degrees. Warbook is a feudal RPG that lets you make allies or fight your friends kingdoms. Snake is understandably more solitary. But all the games encourage users to play more games by earning points for virtual goods, or bragging rights by pw0ning their friends on the leaderboard.
If you’re looking for a killer app on the Internet and are unwilling to get into pornography, gaming is your best bet. So when Meebo opened their platform last month to third party developers, it was clearly only a matter of time before they let game startups in. That time has come.
Twenty games launched on the service last night, ranging from chess and checkers to Texas Hold ‘em. Launch Meebo chat, click on a friend and start a game. And of course, chat with them real-time while you do it.
Meebo’s goal is to take synchronous, real time events and port them, to the extent possible, to their site. The Tokbox video chat application is a natural fit, as is gaming. Now what I’d really like to see is to video chat with my dad while I lose badly to him in chess. You can’t do that yet, but it’s undoubtedly coming.
Game partners include 3rd Sense, Absolutist, AddictingGames, Clearspring Technologies, Come2Play, Gamebrew, MediaGreenhouse, Mochi Media, MyGraffitiWall, Jiggmin, Kongregate, PlayFirst, Presidio Studios, and ZeroCode. The games available now include AddictingGames’ Fratboy Unicycle Relay, Animal Puzzle, Artillery, Attack, Backgammon, Battle Pool, Blackjack, Checkers, Chess, Connect4, Go, Kongregate Racing, Match4, Music Man, Picture This!, Pirate War, Platform Racing, Reversi, Sheep Me, Sploder, Sudoku Wars, Tactics 100, Texas Hold ‘em, and World Travel Puzzle.
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.
Angel investor and startup advisor Jeff Clavier (pictured with Digg founder Kevin Rose) just announced a new $12 million early stage venture fund today at the TechCrunch40 conference. The new fund will be called SoftTech VC II.
Clavier, who has a degree in computer science, has been actively investing in startups over the last few years and has had notable successes such as Truveo (acquired by AOL for a rumored $50 million), Userplane (acquired by AOL for a rumored $35 million), MyBlogLog (acquired by Yahoo for $10 million), Kaboodle (acquired by Hearst for a rumored $30-40 million), Mayas Mom (acquired by BabyCenter for $7 million), Dogster, Kongregate, Edgeio and many others. In other words, he has an eye for winners. His investment philosophy will remain much the same, he says. He’s just now investing money from limited partners as well as his own capital.
He says he’ll invest the fund in a total of 30 to 40 seed stage startups with investments ranging from $100k – $500k. SoftTech VC will focus on consumer Internet.
Casual gaming community Kongregate has closed a $5 million series A round led by Greylock today. This is on top of a $1 million angel round they raised from Reid Hoffman, Joe Kraus, Jeff Clavier and Richard Wolpert, among others. The casual gaming category consists of all those addictive online flash games that often distract you during your downtime (remember desktop tower defense?). James Slavet of Greylock pegs the casual game market at $500 million and expects it to grow even larger.
Compared to the incumbents like Miniclip, Kongregate is modeling itself after Xbox Live. They have built a gamer social network around the games, where gamers can gain ranking, earn awards, and collect trading cards (used in another game). Developers are encouraged to upload games to the site through “game of the week” contests and a revenue share of the ads that are displayed next to the games as they are played (25%-50% depending on exclusivity).
Kongregate plans on putting the lions share of the cash towards site development. As part of that, Kongregate will be financing 8 to 9 developers to create premium games for about $20-$80,000 each. Each of the games will have a free version with an optional paid upgrade to a full version. In exchange for a limited time exclusive distribution agreement, developers will get the majority of that income. Development times are expected to take 2 to 6 months. Kongregate also plans on monetizing through game specific sponsorships (once they hire an advertising manager). They’ve taken a large round considering their burn rate is $80,000 a month for a team of 9.
Since launching last October, Kongregate has gone through some significant growth. The site has grown to 800,000 uniques last month (300K May, 50K March), with 60,000 registered users. Those visitors can choose from a library of 1,400 games and play for an overage of 38 minutes on the site.
We covered Kongregate when they were in private beta, but they’re officially public with a new wad of cash from some big names to back them up. They’ve created a gaming community around Flash games developed by other users, and are announcing a “nearly” $1 million angel round, including funds from Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Joe Kraus (Excite/JotSpot), Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC) and Richard Wolpert (Disney Online), among others.
Kongregate is about user generated games and the competitive gaming community around them, which sets them up to be a really sticky site. CEO Jim Greer compares it to XBox Live for Flash games. Players can chat with each other during game play, create profiles, earn points, and get special achievement bonuses as they progress up the ranks. You don’t have to be registered to play the games, but you do if you want to chat and gain levels. My favorite game on the site so far is Warbears, where you play some bad ass teddies on a mission to save hostages by incapacitating baddies.
Currently players get points for uploading games (big points), completing game challenges, rating games, leaving quality feedback, and referring Kongregate to other players. You get achievement icons by accomplishing challenges, like finding all the hidden items in their top game, The Fancy Pants Adventures. In the future, players will get some rewards for each level-up, which may include new options for personalizing their profile, unlocking the ‘labs’ category on the site, or special offers from Kongregate and its advertisers. The achievements you get from points and challenges will also unlock cards for a special online card game (set to release in May) they are developing in-house.
Developers who upload their own games get more than points. Kongregate will also share 25%-50% of advertising revenue generated from the games with developers.
There are many competing Flash game sites. The giants are Pogo and Miniclip, which support multiplayer games along with a host of downloadable versions that users unlock for a fee after a trial period. Another very large site Newgrounds (500K uniques/day) and Cafe.com come closer. Newgrounds runs on user generated games and has a point ranking system, but doesn’t have Kongregate’s revenue share or chatting. Cafe.com has all downloaded games, with power-ups and avatar attire you can buy. Another startup Bunchball, used to allow embedding of the flash games on other websites up until last week.
Kongregate is an alpha stage online gaming site that will let users upload games they have built, charge users for premium play or features with a one click payment system and share revenues with the site from premium payment and advertisements. The company aims to take the site live just after the holiday season.
Co founders Jim and Emily Greer say they expect to get a term sheet for a seed investment from an unnameable tier A VC by the end of this week. I can see why – I think it looks like a solid business. Jim Greer has ten years of experience in the gaming industry, most recently as Technical Director for EA’s successful web gaming site Pogo.com. Kongregate has a very interesting model with a tech-experienced executive team and a well put together alpha site.
The basis of the site is the user generated content – Kongregate co-founder Jim Greer says he is working to build a brand like YouTube (Who isn’t? But his point is valid here) where visitors to the site don’t expect every game available to be good – but know that the ones highlighted on the front page will be.
Kongregate believes that status plus community form the kind of attainable but long term goals that compel committed use by game players. That makes sense and sounds like the basis for everything from gaming in general to Kathy Sierra’s “committing passionate users.” For that reason they will include inline chat, a metagame point system to track general prestige in all the games, Individual challenges, league play and loyalty points for contributing to the site. Those points will be redeemable in game or with brick and mortar advertising partners.
Revenue sharing
Unlike other sites where game creators share their work for prestige alone, the revenue split at Kongregate is compelling. Competitor Newgrounds, for example, emphasizes that contributers are likely to gain big traffic spikes back to their own sites.
Kongregate will offer between 25% and 50% of ad revenue to game contributers, depending on how closely and exclusively the game is integrated into the Kongregate site. 80% of revenue from in-game microtransactions will go to the game creator.
All of this sounds like a very compelling package. With backing by a prominent VC Kongregate could go all the further. The timing is definitely right. From Second Life crossing the one million user mark to media like Infoworld highlighting the connection between gaming and business, game playing is increasingly being seen as far more than a niche market. User generated media content is now widely seen as having value. I know I enjoyed playing some of the games on the Kongregate site and I expect that many more people will in the future.
We already had HeyZap, the “YouTube for Flash games” and Game Curry, a search engine for Flash games, so not that much of a surprise we now have a “Ning for Flash games” that lets anyone create a gaming website much like Marc Andreessen’s service does the same for social networking sites.
SGN is a game developer that builds applications for social networks. Currently, they’re making games just for Facebook, although Open Social integration seems a no-brainer. Their games include Warbook, Super Snake, Street Race, and Blocky, as well as their recently purchased Fight Club (for an undisclosed sum). You can add each of the games to your profile like any other app, which turns out to be a bit of a pain. I’ve started glossing over the Facebook permissions checklist. Each of the games is a decent way to waste away your work day on Facebook, but Blocky took up the most of my time.
Meebo’s goal is to take synchronous, real time events and port them, to the extent possible, to their site. The Tokbox video chat application is a natural fit, as is gaming. Now what I’d really like to see is to video chat with my dad while I lose badly to him in chess. You can’t do that yet, but it’s undoubtedly coming.
Kongregate believes that status plus community form the kind of attainable but long term goals that compel committed use by game players. That makes sense and sounds like the basis for everything from gaming in general to Kathy Sierra’s “committing passionate users.” For that reason they will include inline chat, a metagame point system to track general prestige in all the games, Individual challenges, league play and loyalty points for contributing to the site. Those points will be redeemable in game or with brick and mortar advertising partners.
