Friday, May 02, 2008

Amazon Founder Invests In Kongregate

Yesterday TechCrunch reported that Amazon founder Jeff Bezo has invested $3 million into the casual gaming site Kongregate. From the article it seems that Kongregate didn't particularly need the money but didn't mind taking it either.

This news gives me great hope for the future of casual gaming. At the moment there are a lot of gaming portals. Many with their own API's and revenue sharing systems. This is bad news for developers. The more your game is played the more revenue you create. At the moment this means publishing your game in as many systems as possible and this may mean developing an understanding of a number of these API's. Companies like MochiAds simplify this to a degree. But you still want to optimise for sites like Kongregate (which don't display MochiAds). What casual gaming needs right now is the emergence of a small number of dominant gaming sites. This will simplify the number of API's developers need to learn, establish a common revenue sharing model and provide casual gamers a shared destination. The success of Kongregate, evident in Bezo's investment, is a clear step in this direction and consequently a good thing for developers and players.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mochiads is a nice system. A developer only has to upload their game to Newgrounds, Multigames and a few other portals and then the game soon is on thousands of portals. And no matter on which portal the game is played, the ad money is paid out via Mochiads.

geekglue said...

Hi Andreas,

thanks for the comment. I certainly agree with you about the great service MochiAds offers.

But seeing as your profile is a link to Multigames I'm surprised you don't have something to say one way or the other about my view that casual gaming would be better off if we had 2 or 3 dominant portals and the rest disappeared?