Kongregate is a popular online game portal, launched way back in 2006. It appears they have decided to take a run at online game stores such as Steam and GoG by taking a 
developer centric approach. As a platform, Kongregate is going to provide the usual back-end services such as achievements as well as site wide leaderboards. They are also providing community building tools for game developers, enabling them to heavily customize their own home pages, customize each game’s sales page and offering “developer friendly terms”. There are also no fees or approval required to upload a game… which leads to the most obvious problem of any online game store… discovery.
Once Steam launched Greenlight, Steam was awash with a flood of absolutely horrible games making good games even harder to find. According to an interview with VentureBeat, Kongregate CEO and co-founder Emily Greer figure they have this covered:
“Through a combination of editorial curation and algorithm-focused game surfacing, our goal is to show the right game to the right player at the right time. This approach will help surface titles that are getting lost in other marketplaces and will help players find new content they didn’t know they’d love.”
Details are pretty scarce right now. Beta is coming in Summer 2018 and the only details we have come from the single developer page:
- Open Platform No fees or approval to upload a game.
- Putting Developers First Your own developer profile page to show off your work, a painless game upload process, and developer-friendly terms.
- Active Player Base An audience of several million active users on Kongregate.com
- 10+ Years Experience Kongregate’s decade-plus experience in content curation and community management
- Rewarding and Social Gameplay A platform wide metagame as the next evolution of earning badges and leveling up.
- Robust, Customized Storefronts Tools to help you design a storefront that highlights your game to the fullest.
Given the large community Kongregate already have, it will be interesting to see if these users can be converted into paying customers. As a general rule, choice is always good and Steam truly needs competitors to drive it forward.