Preaching by the Konverted

Jul 10th 2008 at 09:24 by Michael French

2 comments

In guilty hindsight I shouldn't have done this during the working day - but I'm of course not the only person to have misspent part of the period between 9.30am and 6pm on a site like that, which offers 100s of Flash and casual games from a whole mix of genres.

While people often say its the community value of these sites - which include things like Miniclip and Yoyo games as well - which makes them so popular, I would disagree.

Yes, it's a compelling argument that these sites excite and engage through chat rooms that run alongside the games, the achievement points, and the fact that the games are often user-generated with pure concepts that can only come from the fringe or underground elements of homebrew development.

But what's most important about these sites isn't the fact that they use things to be such compelling time-eaters. Personally, I don't use the chat and the achievement points only sporadically matter to me (the Kongregate cookie pipes the info back to my Facebook profile, but I've not logged into there in ages).

Those things are important. But Kongregate really succeeds because, by stalling our working day and distracting us with quick fix fun (I'm lucky enough to brand it all as 'research'), it has in fact plotted a fast-track course into the games industry's future.

Everything on Kongregate is free. No-cost, not low-cost, is of course a site like Kongregate's reason for being. It has to be to make you participate and be one of the millions of eyeballs seeing the ads put into some of the games. The only things the games on there cost is my time. Like TV they offer the chance to get invested, either in the 20 mins soap opera of something like ButtonHunt or the grand epic battles of Desktop Tower Defence, harder fought than anything on Battlestar Galactica.

The expense of time on the site may well be one with little value, but we are asked to spend it in an arguably risky way, choosing to play games on the basis of just a name, screenshot or a user comment. The pay-off, however, tends to be huge - an array of choice, quirky content and a good mix of shallow single-play games and come-back-for-more-and-more-and-more experiences.

I'd imagine that the payoff is similarly large for the team behind Kongregate itself. The site's acquisition by some big media firm (who buy? Who knows) won't be a surprise, but an inevitability. With VCs invested and its reputation rising, and its doors open to all kinds of ideas, the sky's the limit. And when the iPhone and other handheld devices finally wake up to support Flash in their browsers, don't be surprised if Kongregate or a rival becomes the games source of choice.

Fact is, Kongregate disrupts even the newer casual business models. Although its content is different - scrappier, lo-fi, sometimes more charming because of that - to the big developer-run portals (which are doing a roaring trade), Kongregate and its ilk make those costly subscription-based portals look completely outdated.