Another YouTube for games

This one is Kongregate,
which is founded by someone I worked with a very very long time ago for two weeks. 😉 We overlapped at the very beginnings of UO, back at Origin. I’ve been following it for a little while, but he came out of the woodwork today when he saw I had blogged pjio.com, to extend an invite to readers of this blog:

Hi all –

I founded a startup called Kongregate doing something related. We think Flash is already a great tool for making games, and we’re concentrating on building community features and a metagame to tie together what people upload.

We just launched a private alpha 3 weeks ago, and as of this morning we have 43 games – a lot of them are really great ones, too. We’ve just expanded our server capacity, and have room for a bunch of new players, so if you’re interested come to http://kongregate.com and request an invitation. We’ll get one to you within an hour or two.

We’ll also be supporting Shockwave games soon and Java a little later on. We give a share of the revenue we make to the game developer – up to 50% depending on whether they implement our APIs and whether the game is exclusive to us.

Game developers will also be able to use our 1-click payment system to charge for premium content in their games. For instance you could have a racing game where the first 3 tracks are free, and then additional tracks are $0.50 each or $5 for all of them. The price is up to the developer – here the revenue share will be much higher than 50% – it’s your game after all.

One cool thing we’re doing that isn’t implemented yet is a metagame. By playing the individual Flash games you can earn “Cards” – sort of like Achievements on Xbox Live. Those cards are playable in an online collectible card game, think Magic the Gathering.

A lot of this isn’t implemented yet, but you can check out the basics now. We’re really trying to get feedback from developers to make sure we’re implementing the right set of features and making a site that will be the best place to upload web games.