Kongregate closed to new games, shutting down forums and chat
kongregate.com
kongregate.com
Where has the entire browser gaming ecosystem gone to? Kongregate had some of the most original games I've ever played. Kongregate shutting down doesn't just sadden me, it infuriates me: all vendors had to do was to sandbox Flash (which Chrome did!) and not autoplay it. Instead everyone followed the lead of an arrogant jerk who obviously knew everything better than everyone.
Communities like Kongregate, Armorgames, Newgrounds will never exist again. There will never be another War of the Web.
What this news really means is that how people are using the web is changing. When I was younger, browser games were the only real way to play games without spending money or having my parents buy me a Gameboy (which they never did). I could get on Newgrounds from any PC at school, it was a big part of my life.
These days, every one of Kongregate's users has a smartphone with free games more accessible and convenient than the old browser gaming model.
I run an internet writing forum that has also suffered over the years despite being a relatively massive forum in its hey day. What changed? I think these are just the affects of the smartphone era. And the centralization of social media, in my case.
People just don't go to Kongregate anymore, the hey day is over. And it's not because of Flash/HTML5 -- it's not like users in droves are even thinking about that. Kongregate has to somehow compete with kids playing Fortnite on their iPhone before class for free. Times are changing.
The ease of developing, distributing, and playing Flash games is completely unmatched by phone games. I could open a dozen tabs of games in the browser in seconds. How do I do that on a phone? Then there is the playability of games. Gameplay involving a small touchscreen is very different than a keyboard and mouse. As a former Flash developer, I could produce a Flash game over a long weekend, release it to hundreds of websites shortly after, and would go on to get 100,000 plays. I've yet to be shown how I can do that on iOS or Android.
Really? Isn't it more down to skillset? I tried to build some Flash games back in the day and really couldn't Nowadays, I can whip up an HTML5/Android PoC with Godot in a day.
I have to agree with the OP - it seems like less about the war on Flash and more about changing casual gamer behaviour. The reason those 100,000 players found it was due to platform discovery, rather than technology itself. If the users aren't looking for the games in the same way they used to, that's the bigger story.
What are we missing from the Flash days? The GUI? Is the GUI the main thing that devs are missing to provide these experiences in HTML5? Because the tech is definitely there.
See: https://www.createjs.com/ And an example indie game built in CreateJS: https://donnyfromgordoncity.itch.io/gordon-city
This isn't so much a problem for developers but the true beauty of Flash was kids went on Kongregate, Newgrounds etc watched Flash animations and played Flash games then got interested in learning how to make them themselves.
They (lets be honest here) the pirated Flash and even a 12 year old would be able to open that interface and make a little animation in it. Now here's the real magic because the second you need to do anything more advanced like pause your animation or loop it you actually need to write a little bit of code.
The real thing we lost with Flash wasn't the technology because canvas and webgl are absolutely superior now, it was the onramp to shipping games and animation content from young creators and the clear path to doing so.
Make a little game, export a SWF, share it with your friends, upload it to a website. You can't even upload something to an app store without having a credit card, paying $99 in some cases and entering legal contracts.
I think a big issue is indeed the missing GUI, and the sense of solidity it provided. Flash Pro likely empowered its users more than most people think— its familiar tools lowered the barrier to entry and helped folks collaborate. Its animation paradigm was fantastic, and offered a large degree of control. Most modern offerings built on web tech are much more... fiddly. And none of them have a Newgrounds or Kongregate built around them.
Also! Remember when Flash added support for mobile devices (and later HTML5), and we suddenly had to worry about texture atlases, and had to go through our scene graphs, specifying which graphics' motions could be migrated to "cacheAsBitmapMatrix"? And how all our art suddenly looked a bit JPEGgier?
That was kind of a watershed moment. All us Flash creators suddenly realized that the software renderer that served us so well had no equivalent we could pivot to in 2009, and all available options led to clear visual degradation. We set the bar so low, few of us ever bothered to try, and while the tech has improved significantly in the intervening decade, no toolmaker has tried to exceed those expectations. (three.js is an exception, because prior to its debut the barrier for entry for 3D web content was pretty high.)
While I'm rambling about the tech side of things, I think one additional source of friction nowadays is, if I make a game in CreateJS and TypeScript, and you make a game in Phaser and vanilla JS, and my friend makes a game in OpenFL and Haxe, well, we can't exactly collaborate.
Who cares? Flash veterans, I'm willing to bet! Consider the "tween wars" of the early 2000s. Every Flash dev I knew debated the merits of all those 3rd-party AS3 animation libraries. We didn't want twenty (and there WERE twenty), we wanted one! The same folks see Flash's replacements as another bunch of frameworks to have to have long boring conversations about— except now, they're entrusted with the full burden of representing and rendering our interactive scene graphs.
There's also something to be said about fostering creator-focused communities around these technologies, but I'm out of breath.
That's not necessarily an unqualified advantage. I'll say this for HTML5 and having multiple files: you can easily choose what to load and when, which means if you're smart you can load your game very quickly by prioritising only the most essential assets and degrading gracefully until the rest of loaded in the background. This means that people don't have to wait to start playing.
It is more work to do this, although not as much as you might imagine (particularly for sounds and music), but I'd say worth it.
I don't really know Flash - had very limited exposure to it about 17 or 18 years ago - so it's entirely possible similar mechanisms might have existed that I just don't know about.
You can also easily package up your game into a single file for deployment on mobile devices using something like Cordova, which basically just zips everything up.
You can, but you don't get to start with a fancy IDE designed towards animation and event-based interaction.
IIRC it wasn't until about 2010 that app stores started, and now ten years later we're just starting to get standard languages/rameworks running natively across iOS and Android.
2. Add SPA functionality.
"games" with constant ads and horrible pay-to-win mechanics. Even Nintendo can't release an honest game for mobile - I was excited by the mobile Dr. Mario until it turned out to be the same horseshit as the rest of the ecosystem, needing paid tokens to be allowed to play more levels in a day and all that. Who wants to make Angry Birds anymore when it's more profitable to trap people with bait and switch gacha games stuffed full of ads? A good mobile game is extremely rare.
But it seems they would rather just have it free and have it subsidized by ads and exploiting whales.
Then there's Fortnight on the smartphone.
Kongregate can't just compete with the crappy adware games and call it a day. It also has to compete with games like Fortnight. Browser games are almost completely absent from both the multiplayer and AAA space. That is very hard to compete with.
Better solution is to support indie devs that produce good games and stop supporting/stealing/playing the shitty studio games.
Those are used in full price games. Its because they extract much greater amounts of money form player base. So that is weak argument for all those starving game-makers.
Sure some smaller ones are hurting from the piracy, but people who pirate are usually ones who don't have money to buy games in a first place.
When i was young I pirated games as we were poor. Now I don't pirate because its more convenient for me to just buy things I like.
I agree with azhenley; this is a ludicrous claim. Flash games used the input methods of the computer they ran on. Mobile games are limited to what you can do if the player's only input device is one fat finger. They are neither more accessible nor more convenient.
Meaning its showing the age of the person that posted it. My daughter wouldn't praise the usability of a mouse and keyboard, but instead if she could download it in the app store while walking around the neighborhood with friends.
Additionally voice and camera are input devices on phones and generally much better than those on the average PC.
Voice and camera aren't really usable input mechanisms for most people. Camera will kill your battery life and voice recognition won't understand most people (English is not their first language).
I don't want to install crap on my phone every time I want to check out a game, while I used to play a new one on kongregate every single day and not worry at all.
Not really that weird. First there wasn't that many kids into technology in the first place, and those kids that were back into it then are on hackernews today. The kids that were not into it are the ones that I'm charging an hourly rate to fix their technology.
Also, technology is no longer 'that' interesting or different. There was a lot of wizardry in getting technology to actually work back in the day. And if you got it to work there tended to be praise involved. either from yourself "I did a good job and got this broken thing to work" or external praise "Wow, I can't believe you got this video call to work, you're a genius". This was a big push for me to become who I am now, an affirmation in my life.
The issue with webp not working is a good example. Back then it was common for an interface to break with no good errors or reason. These days we'd blame the programmer for not providing a useful message like "Image format invalid, please upload a jpg file". Also, there is so much technology that you can spend/waste all your time trying to fix an ocean of problems that you'll never reach the bottom of.
One of these is an issue of what you can do in the game. The other is an issue of where you can play the game.
I’m on a forum of about 100 people who chat about crossover fanfiction, with a good share of us writing our own fics. And other random topics too, of course. It’s fun, self-hosted, and no news feed.
Maybe it can still exist because of the high proportion content creators, making the community feel like a community.
They're still around but the space has changed a lot and the forum software is outdated too. It's much cheaper to run servers now but most people have moved on to social or chat groups.
$5/mo is how Akismet spam detection costs.
You don't need to be paying for spam detection on a small community forum that is being actively moderated. Set up the software to prevent newbies from making new threads without moderator approval, use a DNSBL, have spam reports from anyone who's been around longer than a week automatically hide posts, remove said privilege from people who abuse it. I've never had a serious spam problem on a small forum I was actively moderating. Same with mailing lists. Also, if you do feel like you need spam detection, Akismet is available for free if your forum, like many, is non-commercial.
Additionally, bemusement - watching people go crazy over Reddit and Slack, when all I can see is glitzy, more newbie-friendly, centralized incarnations of Usenet and IRC.
Don't even get me started with Facebook (though, I hear FB isn't even popular with today's kids - rather, it's that thing old people use.)
No they don't. There are tons of young children who play these games and don't have phones.
Is that where we are heading now? That even 6 year olds get phones?
Isn’t a phone just another computer? I mean, how is it worse?
But you know, how many kids are like that? Given that and a tablet... most kids would just take the tablet. I think the ones who are like that, will find their way to it anyway, given half a chance (so exposure is still important).
Maybe there's some sort of middle ground - mobile games/apps that employ the same basic concepts as programming, to act as a gateway?
Or maybe in a decade we'll just have holographic haptic keyboards that are trivially portable...
I see a lot of other people piling on to also rebut this bit, which is what I was specifically targeting:
> These days, every one of Kongregate's users has a smartphone with free games more accessible and convenient than the old browser gaming model.
Basically everyone responding to me has tried to catch me on a technicality error. Yet notice how these "rebuttals" don't change the reality that Kongregate and NewGrounds are struggling.
For example, a response that actually engages with a point I was making would be to disagree with the reasons why they are dying and why Kongregate pulled the plug on new games and chat.
I'm pointing out that Kongregate has to compete with games like Dota Underlords and Fortnight on portable phones made for portable gaming which are a caliber of game you don't even see in the browser game market.
You'll have to help me understand why you think your daughter not having a smartphone moves the needle on the points being made here.
I think it's very likely they could make enough money from their remaining brand and html5 games to pay for a couple of full-time bodies to keep the lights on. The company has changed hands a few times the last few years and the founders have moved on, so I would think it has more to do with the current owners bailing on Kartridge and winding the business down than the pure economics of the site itself.
I wonder what the phpBB of social media/smartphone apps would look like.
This is not true. I still play games on Kongregate - a few times a month.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=kongrega...
o7
If you don't want to maintain a small army of full-time security staff, you can't ship binary code running untrusted data-as-programs on billions of consumer devices. Full stop.
Much effort was put into Air research and development. As a result, Zynga IPOd with a ton of huge web games in the pipeline with the theory we could cross compile with Air. This was a massive mistake and Supercell and King quickly dominated us while the next few years were spent catching up on mobile gaming.
It had to go. We had to adapt to better things.
It's not that webgl isn't capable. It's that the market for in browser flash like games has diminished when you can now play AAA games in the browser.
The market has changed. And sadly that doesn't mean every single person doesn't want them anymore. Just that the majority don't.
If WebGL and Flash competed on an equal footing the WebGL tools (including Flash-like, newbie-friendly frameworks) would be forced to get better than Flash.
- Strongly typed language (js is still not there) - interestingly Microsoft killed Ecmascript 4 which was AS3, but are now championing typescript) - Canvas api is basically the flash.graphics api - Tweeting libraries - It didn't invent Ajax at all, but wow was it great at the times for dynamic data - 3d in your browser, and it was fast too for computers of its time - 2d / 3d transformations per object - custom font loading - reusable components
There was a lot about flash that was bad also, like compiling it was a chore, flex was a disaster, but it pushed the web forward so for that I am thankful
An open alternative was available - HTML5 games were possible before Chrome started disabling Flash by default. Smartphones and social media really killed the market for online browser games - you really don't seem them anymore other than .io games. For anyone developing games, the return is far greater in the app store vs. online. Ad Revenue, if your name isn't Google/Facebook is a joke. I can't imagine why anyone would develop a browser game today when the App Store exists.
Flash the runtime? Flash the browser plugin? Flash the authoring environment?
Actionscript the language?
Not all of this stuff needed to be dumped. And not all of it has been replaced by something that can measure up to what was lost.
Some of
> Some of
Well, you made my day, at least =)
I think the prospects for an 11 year old hacker creating their first game with unity or godot are much higher than they were in 2006 with flash.
Look at the submissions for any itch.io 48 hour game jam and see how many of them are playable on the web, and created by people with very little experience. These prospects have moved to places where they're more accessible, not disappeared.
Here's an example where 1158 web entries were created in a weekend.
https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/entries
For a jam with no prizes.
I don't think this is true at all. Making something in Flash and publishing it even back then was easier to me than to use Unity or Godot today. The latter two tools are much more powerful, but way more complex.
Also, you linked a game maker's toolkit gamejam. Of course they're going to be playable in the browser. I would consider that to he easier to use (or at least on par) than Flash.
Game Makers Toolkit is just the name of the youtube channel that hosts the jam. Not the name of a tool anyone used for it. Most people used one of the three tools I named. You're probably thinking of Constructor, which is the third one I named and is indeed easier than flash was. But I think recent Unity releases have surpassed my memory of the flash tooling I got to use. Tough to say because I don't have the old shockwave stuff around anymore to do a side by side comparison.
In most of the itch.io jams, browser games are strong. People still do downloads too, but the winners are almost always HTML5/WebGL playable. You just get drastically more plays (and therefore more ratings during the contest) if people don't have to install things.
I think a lot of the creativity you used to find on Kongregate really has gathered at itch.io.
I'm sorry, I don't understand why. If someone develops a fun little game in Flash, and then I play it on Kongregate, what harm has been done?
I just wish flash would have been stripped down into a web only version that was safe and only for things like flash games.
Flash has lasting anthropological significance. Some of the kids who grew up tinkering with Flash grew into structural roles and helped build the internet as we know it today. Others sequestered the interests that got kicked off of the mainstream into petri dish crevices of the internet such as the early days of 4chan.
Documentaries about snakes, as well?
In all seriousness, you make a reasonable argument, but tinkering existed well before the age of Flash. Now, won't something else fill the role?
https://itch.io/, basically. There's also the Pico-8 gaming ecosystem which has some really great concepts built with the platform's constraints: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
Several key aspects of Flash, 90s web, Hypercard and other technologies that sustained creative enthusiast ecosystems seem to have been low barrier to entry, easy sharing and discovery, and a lack of obvious alternatives for a large pool of creators and users. Those things are hard to (re)create.
On the other hand, demoscene shows no signs of dying as far as I can tell.
The app economy is huge and locks in creators and users, but it has high barriers to entry as well as poor discovery and very limited sharing locked down by the platform owner.
There seem to be many easy-to-use game engines, as well as sites for web games, but that's part of the problem - there isn't the concentration of interest in one class of games or an easy way to share them across sites.
If only browser security was so simple.
Sites like this played a large part in increasing my bravery and familiarity on the web, on which I now earn my living.
Save for having flash enabled . Hard to believe they've validated all 128,000 games.
Things that native apps can do trivially but that require explicit permission for accessed in Flash (or the web in general): filesystem read/write, listen in on microphones, spy with webcams, etc etc.
If you have a flash zero day (and they totally exist!), you can do those things, but that significantly raises the difficulty, which reduces the number of attacks you'll actually see in the wild. Most attackers aren't the NSA or Mossad, and resources that they have to spend on getting and exploiting zero days are resources they can't spend on other parts of the exploit chain.
Another way of putting this is that there are two senses of "sandboxed" - one is having a limited API surface and one is using software fault isolation techniques on the interpreter/runtime itself. Flash (and JS) always had the former, even though the latter is fairly recent.
I don't think the "next big thing" here will be HTML5, though. Unity is _ridiculously_ easy and has led to large swaths of indie games on Steam - people don't quite understand just how easy it is to make games in Unity these days. You can pass without understanding coding at all to a large extent, and reminds me a _lot_ of working in Flash.
If you don't believe me, look up Sam Hogan on YouTube - or search YouTube for "unity game in 24h". I'm not saying these are all good - but it reminds me a _lot_ of how Flash enabled rapid development of game ideas.
The reality is that making good games is extremely hard, and has always been.
Unity is not the first game framework, there have been many along the years. Flash being one of them (while not even designed for that originally!).
Some of them are easier, some are more featureful, some have better graphics, some are specialized into a genre etc.
While some genres need almost no code, others are full of pages of tricky game logic. And that is without counting into account the engine code.
Further, Unity had nothing to do with Steam being flooded. The actual reason is that
1- Valve pivoted into being a distribution platform,
2- they stopped curating what goes in,
3- gaming exploded and became way more mainstream (along with streaming, e-sports and programming, all which helped a lot), and
4- people started making money selling courses, degrees and content on how to make games.Your comment is great without that first bit.
Out of curiosity, how do you deal then with veiled ads etc. in this day and age?
I know that's not a perfect answer, but it's pretty much all we have, and the approach does have one major advantage: it doesn't need to care how veiled an ad is, or if it's an ad at all.
But seriously, those are just a fraction of the amazingness I've experienced. I don't even think the 2D platformer Portal clone is in that list - that was amazing.
Kongregate is still in my morning ritual, and some new games are still a lot of fun and enjoyable.
I guess they want to concentrate themselves on their new kartridge product (not working on Linux...).
But I find this announcement surprising (closing chat) as they just added a new (and, well, not very useful) feature to it.
Strange. But I hope they’ll have great time in their new adventures.
I have every single Shiny Kongpanion there is, have not missed a single one. I have around 70% of the badges on the site.
In a way, no more badges means I might actually get to 100 (yah right :) - except that with flash breaking probably 90% of the games at the end of the year, there's not really a whole lot of time left to do that.
The Kongpanions were supposed to be used in games but after a few weeks I had enough Kongpanions to saturate any game that used them. Again, more imaginary internet points.
Dan was a really nice guy, very friendly and enthusiastic. Wish I had done more with him in retrospect, but the artist I was working with suddenly lost interest while working on the second game, and things kinda fell apart.
The first game is still up on Newgrounds: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/210883
I was also involved in the GoG days but I didn't think people remembered that. It changed pretty quickly due to legal reasons.
As Flash started to wane, the quality of games dropped sharply. Even then the devs who did take the plunge and learn Unity, the games from that released on Kong rarely lived up to the quality of Flash games. The chat rooms also become more niche and weird. As an example, there were one or two major teen dating public chat rooms that they could never get control of. No matter how many people they banned, they'd just keep making new accounts.
I had no idea they were folding. They just rolled out a new currency feature (blocks) 12 days ago.
I've been on the site for so many years. 1936 badges level 73. I'm grieving and in denial this is even happening!
I subscribed NewGrounds because I don't want them to disappear too
:sad:
My favorite, which was acquired by Kongregate in Dec 2019:
2D Last Man Standing. Great fun.
I disagree, browser based games took a very hard hit after Flash was killed and the infrastructure that was built around these games died. Newgrounds might be still limping around, but pretty much everything else, like Kongregate now, has died and nothing replaced it (most of the sponsors that funded these games moved to mobile, but very few of the actual developers did and mobile games are very different than the more raw/brutal flash games you'd find on pretty much every flash gaming site out there).
The tech, from a purely technical and capabilities perspective, is better sure. But the ecosystem and tools are much worse.
None of the kids that got started by making silly animations in Flash back in 1999-2007 could do that today: there is no paintbrush tool for the web.
UPDATE: Yeah, Adobe's document here says that many features aren't supported by their HTML5 export feature: https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/using/creating-publishing-ht...
Anyone else do the same and have a better recollection of the tools you used?
Somebody created an entire browser - called something like Niflheim but I can't remember the exact name - designed for the purpose of cheating Kongregate APIs. Finally, a subversive guy found a way to submit directly to the "I have won a badge API" and wrote a program to submit all the badges in batch. This took the fun out of winning achievements in games, but introduced many of us to the world of coding, automation, and hacking. Why grind for hours when you can cheat the scoreboard in seconds?
I also developed a way to cheat on Kongai, which was one of my favourite games on Kongregate. However I got bored and moved onto other things in life shortly after. If you were active in this community around 2008, we probably talked to each other back then.
Here is a tool called Ragnarok that let's you edit values based on their name. You would open the reversed actionscript and could play with things based on the variable name:
Editing save files was big. The files were in a proprietary format called sol. All of the videos I see on that channel are just "download this save file with a completed game state", but there were tools for editing the save file yourself. Some games introduced obfuscation of data in the save file and the cat and mouse game began.
Oh, here's an example! Apparently the sol editor was a feature of Ragnarok, and maybe the disassembler too:
Here's a video of Niflheim, seems similar to Ragnarok. Maybe Ragnarok replaced it as a better tool?
Other than that it seems most of the cheats on that youtube channel are using cheat engine. While I definitely used that, I don't recall it being part of my go-to arsenal.
KongregateHack was really young, impressive that he ran a whole online community aged 14 or 15. Wonder what he's up to now.
If free markets are truly what is best for consumers, then casual gaming isn’t a free market.
End of an era. Thanks for all the memories, Kongregate.
Jeez I was so young, I’d just log in to kongregate, type “i liek ninjas” because that was how people knew I was at my keyboard, and then spend the whole day playing flash games.
I did this hundreds of times over many years, took a break during college, and when I came back they’d culled down the number of chat rooms.
Guess I’m just replying to vent, and to also say thanks for all the good times, Kongregate.
I no longer contribute to any forums because of stuff like this.
There were various forums I’ve contributed to over the years — sometimes posting thousands of times over 5-10 years. Then the forum is migrated to new software (losing all user accounts or posts), or shutdown for good.
Mozilla did this several times.
Why bother spending the time to contribute towards an online community when your credibility in that community can be removed when new management comes in and decides to change forum software or shutdown forums altogether? I imagine it’s how Yahoo Groups people felt.
Even my posting to HR is limited to stuff that I guess will be gone one day.
Nothing lasts forever.
How about for the impact you had during the time it was active? I don't know what your contributions were, but if they were that prolific, then surely they were of service.
Shutdowns are always a blow, and I don't intend to tell you want to do with your valuable time. But hopefully you can see more value in your contributions than only what they may have meant in the future.
They migrated their software and the accounts became unlinked to the previous contributions. In the last 7 years, I contributed only 40 more times.
A rose by any other name is still a rose.
Eventually it seemed like everyone moved away from browser games to console and PC games, at least that was true for me. It's been a long time since I've even thought about Kongregate, but it's still sad to see it go.
Also wonder how much of this is business/cost optimization vs user-generated liability.
I think browser games kinda died when smartphones came around because you got better experience when playing a game naively than in a smartphone browser.
But I think browser games technology is better than ever and there are a lot of opportunities to explore in that industry.
You were supposed to be able to exchange them for chat stickers.
The launch was a disaster, partly breaking the site for 2 days, and they had to disable the stickers.
And without chat, I don't see much point in the stickers. (Maybe they'll find something else to do with the blocks, stickers were never that interesting to me anyway.)
In a way you can say that rather than the beginning, Forte actually killed Kongregate, probably by draining developer time and budget.
I get it, Flash is buggy and second in being a security mistake only to PDFs. Still, it's a shame these little games will be forgotten, swept aside.
Apple wants you to download an iPhone app (and buy the iPhone for that)
If all a user needs to do is open a browser tab, on any device, and have an good app-like experience they hardly need an iPhone.
The web never really caught up with the experience flash gave the user.
And Apple benefited.
This kills the majority of the games on Kongregate.
Nostalgia.
RIP Kongregate.
You didn't have to do that, You could still upload your game without it. It was just if you wanted a chance of getting badged. And badged games had way more plays. So there was a lot of incentive to do it.
https://www.google.com/collections/s/list/Yvht3mJiT6aaJJQbQG... my google collection of later plan
I Loved Kongregate Games!