Kongregate closed to new games, shutting down forums and chat

https://www.kongregate.com/forums/1-kongregate/topics/1916387-important-kongregate-announcement

by teej • 6 years ago

302 226 6 years ago

ljp_206• 6 years ago

As a kid, Kongregate was a safe, inclusive space for high-quality games that I didn't have to fear would mess up a family member's computer. It looks like that much hasn't changed a lot, which is great.

Sites like this played a large part in increasing my bravery and familiarity on the web, on which I now earn my living.

sodaplayer• 6 years ago

Yeah, Kongregate was also one of my first chatroom experiences as a kid. The community had many friendly people, and now as an adult, it's nice looking back and feeling I had a good environment to learn how to interact on the web. It also inspired me to learn Actionscript to try to make my own Flash games, which eventually lead to me now with a CS degree.

maerF0x0• 6 years ago

that I didn't have to fear would mess up a family member's computer

Save for having flash enabled . Hard to believe they've validated all 128,000 games.

tkzed49• 6 years ago

To be more realistic, Flash was a much smaller attack surface than downloading and running random executables. I'm guessing that a fairly small number of kids were actually subject to Flash exploits while playing games on Kongregate. Compare that to downloading a screensaver...

bitL• 6 years ago

Send them some love then (i.e. $) to help them out.

jgeralnik3• 6 years ago

I spent middle school hacking games on Kongregate to obtain badges and high scores. There were incredible tools available for hacking flash games - debuggers, decompilers, cheat engine like tools. Most of the tools were dedicated to kongregate games and allowed easy interfacing with the website. Years later I tried to remember exactly what tools I had used and what communities I participated in and was never able to find them.

Anyone else do the same and have a better recollection of the tools you used?

hyper_reality3• 6 years ago

Yes! That's how I spent a lot of my spare time too in adolescence. There was a forum called Kongrehack run by a Swedish guy where game-hacks were shared. Initially we used Cheat Engine to modify select memory locations in games, but the game creators came up with better defences to obscure the easy hacks.

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.

nextaccountic• 6 years ago

Is this the forum? https://konghack.com/

jgeralnik3• 6 years ago

Yes! I was definitely on Kongrehack and used Niflheim. I never used mass submission of badges, I would break each game individually. Hacking the game became the challenge, and games that nobody else on Kongrehack had managed to cheat at were the best challenge of all

sneeuwpopsneeuw• 6 years ago

It feels sort of sad to see this website go. It still reminds me of the kingdom rush games I played a few years ago.

zornthewise• 6 years ago

You can get them in mobile for like a dollar each and they are just as good if my memory is anything to go by!

savanaly• 6 years ago

Also available on Steam which is where I first played them.

arusahni• 6 years ago

The community was great - I still talk to some of the folks from the chat rooms I used to mod. I loved the dev community that sprung up around the site, too, with useful userscripts and assistant apps.

End of an era. Thanks for all the memories, Kongregate.

_1100• 6 years ago

I kick myself sometimes for not being around when they cut down on chat rooms and I never got reconnect with anyone in Ninja chat.

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.

Sniffnoy• 6 years ago

Man, I just hope someone can somehow bring back Kongai (and fix the remaining bugs). That game was amazing; it was just a poor fit for what it was used for. (A difficult competitive game used as a sitewide metagame on a site full of quick casual games...? What were they thinking? But the game was amazing! There's just not really any good way to play it anymore.)

chillwaves• 6 years ago

Browser based games are better than ever. Wonder where it will go next.

My favorite, which was acquired by Kongregate in Dec 2019:

https://surviv.io

2D Last Man Standing. Great fun.

DaiPlusPlus2• 6 years ago

Capabilities are better, thanks to WebGL and modern JavaScript - and no proprietary tooling is needed, but the overall barrier for entry now is much higher: during the heyday of Flash any teenager could put together something silly, adapt, learn, improve, and beyond. You can’t do that anymore because there is no good, well-supported, code-free way of making art and animations without writing any code for HTML5+Canvas.

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.

sp3323• 6 years ago

Adobe Animate (previously Flash Professional CC) added an HTML5 export button in mid-2018.

badsectoracula2• 6 years ago

Browser based games are better than ever.

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.

fouc• 6 years ago

I'm worried about all the great flash games that will disappear when no browsers can run flash anymore. I hope preservation efforts are successful..

ianai• 6 years ago

So what happened to this site? Did people move onto something else (a site) or was it smartphones?

ars6• 6 years ago

It was killed by Flash. Adobe is not just going to stop updating flash, they are outright force disabling it at the end of the year, even for people willing to risk it.

This kills the majority of the games on Kongregate.

8note• 6 years ago

And thus shockwave, with its .exe outputs wins in the end for old games?

dvaun• 6 years ago

There are still old places like Stickpage[0] and Newgrounds[1] that are up. They feel like relics from the early web before mass consolidation onto social networks like MySpace took place.

[0] https://www.stickpage.com/

[1] https://www.newgrounds.com/

legohead• 6 years ago

https://armorgames.com/

inglor2• 6 years ago

I grew up in Newgrounds and helped Dan set up ArmorGames and ran some of their contests. It was a lot of fun and a super creative space.

wizzwizz42• 6 years ago

Newgrounds is helping develop Ruffle, a Flash player built in Rust that runs (via WebAssembly, I think, though it technically supports ASM.js via emscripten) in HTML5 browsers: https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle

Yoric• 6 years ago

Good luck. I know of a previous Flash player built in Rust that was killed iirc by Adobe's lawyers after years of development.

Exuma• 6 years ago

Literally an ancient relic from my past. Seems very long ago, so wholesome.

JohnDeHope• 6 years ago

I was literally just starting to surf their dev pages to get back into some very light HTML game design. I don’t have nearly enough time to make an actual game with an actual game engine. But I’m a professional web developer so I can smack HTML around with a little bit of JavaScript no problem. Now I’m not sure what to do. Is https://ldjam.com/ the new home for this sort of thing? Newgrounds?

lewispollard• 6 years ago

Itch.io game jams. Check out Phaser.js, a javascript WebGL games framework, it's dead easy if you know a little JS.

sp3323• 6 years ago

Check out A-Frame or an authoring tool built on it. It's very HTML-oriented.

ars6• 6 years ago

Reading between the lines it seems they can not handle the volume of spam they are getting. (Many forums going read-only, and chat rooms shutting down.)

wizzwizz42• 6 years ago

Sounds more like they're trying to gently kick the community out, because they're shutting down the site-as-we-know-it. Gently, because Kongregate is still pretty cool.

JeanMarcS• 6 years ago

But, but, but... How will I get my badge of the day ? All those shiny konpanions I collected for years ?

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.

ars6• 6 years ago

I'm in the same boat :(

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.

Mathnerd314• 6 years ago

I lost interest once I hit the level cap, level 65. Although they did raise it, there's little reason to chase after imaginary internet points.

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.

atcg01012• 6 years ago

I wonder if this is the beginning of Kongregate's integration and deployment of Forte powered features: https://blog.kongregate.com/kongregate-announces-partnership...

ars6• 6 years ago

They already delivered something with Forte. You earn "blocks" now for getting the weekly kongpanion.

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.

atcg01012• 6 years ago

I did not know that they already had started with a public roll out of Forte powered features. Thanks for the added insight!

JoshTriplett• 6 years ago

For people looking for alternatives, try https://www.reddit.com/r/WebGames/ , which specifically lists games that can be played within a browser.

whereistimbo4• 6 years ago

my fav games on kongregate: https://archive.vn/pPJwB

whereistimbo4• 6 years ago

web.archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/20200701213611/https://www.kongr...

whereistimbo4• 6 years ago

https://www.google.com/collections/s/list/Gik0oLzvfLI3Vb58dO... my google collection of article

https://www.google.com/collections/s/list/Yvht3mJiT6aaJJQbQG... my google collection of later plan

at_a_remove• 6 years ago

I was never big on Flash games but I did enjoy one on Kongregate: a card-based game inspired heavily by the various works of H.P. Lovecraft.

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.

mrkramer• 6 years ago

I never played a video game on Kongregate because when I was interested in browser games Miniclip was number 1 in Europe.

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.

javajosh2• 6 years ago

Some of the best games (and game ideas) I've ever seen, bar none, were on Kongregate. Flash (and particularly later versions of ActionScript) were just so good for this kind of programming, and really, even the modern web hasn't caught up yet. Looking forward though to the next iteration which is HTML5 based...

slimsag• 6 years ago

I am going to miss this a lot, too.

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.

jfkebwjsbx3• 6 years ago

Is this an ad? Not only you mention a single engine, you also sell it as super easy.

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.

kopos• 6 years ago

What is the difference between Unity and Flash? As a runtime environment and editing environment?

tomgp• 6 years ago

Unity was approachable in its early days. Now it’s a mess , not to say that there aren’t many fantastic games produced using it, but anyone coming to it now is going to find it very hard to get a foothold. Having had a good experience with it when it first started making waves I installed it for a family member recently and found the whole process excruciating, none of the tutorials seem to work out the box and there’s a lot of specialised vocabulary you need to know before you can make use of the tools. It seems like Unity is competing with Unreal now rather than going for the market vacated by Flash.

moneywoes• 6 years ago

what were some of those titles?

javajosh2• 6 years ago

Here you go - I had to recover my password and make my profile public to give you this link! You're welcome! https://www.kongregate.com/accounts/medoc/favorites

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.

Kiro• 6 years ago

How did games work on Kongregate? Did people makes games specifically for the platform with their APIs?

ars6• 6 years ago

Typically they would have an existing game and then integrate the APIs into the game.

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.

derivagral• 6 years ago

Funny timing; I was considering whether I wanted to use their platform to try a concept or two and get "free" social support, but now I suppose I'll have to figure out handling that on my own.

Also wonder how much of this is business/cost optimization vs user-generated liability.

ckocagil3• 6 years ago

People said Flash wouldn't be missed. People said WebGL and canvas would bring us a much better experience. It's been nearly a decade since Steve Jobs declared war on Flash.

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.

aaomidi• 6 years ago

Flash was absolutely atrocious from a technical standpoint.

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.

devwastaken• 6 years ago

It was atrocious but there was much better tooling behind it that made it all make sense.

I just wish flash would have been stripped down into a web only version that was safe and only for things like flash games.

Octopodes• 6 years ago

It had to go. We had to adapt to better things.

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?

andybak• 6 years ago

Flash was absolutely atrocious from a technical standpoint.

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

ckocagil3• 6 years ago

What was atrocious about Flash? AS3 was a decent language. Better, more open tools were coming along. Insecurity and privacy concerns were addressed by properly sandboxing it. The biggest downside of Flash is that it wasn't an open web technology, but the answer to that shouldn't have been to remove it before an open alternative was established. All in all I don't see what all that fuss was about.

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.

mustacheemperor• 6 years ago

I think the prospects for an 11 year old hacker creating their first game with art, programmed behaviors etc, were much higher on Flash in 2006 than on WebGL in 2020.

marshray• 6 years ago

Adobe had a decade or more to show that they could develop a secure browser plugin. They couldn't do it, or decided their resources were better spent elsewhere.

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.

etaioinshrdlu2• 6 years ago

Sandboxing turned out to be a good answer. I don't know why we don't just implement Flash in WebAssembly and be done with it. It can still be built-in to web browsers.

agrippanux• 6 years ago

Adobe didn’t want to continue to support Flash. I know this because their office was across the street from Zynga’s and they came over and told us (I was running a team at the time doing experimental HTML5 games). Their plan was to move to Air and they hyped the crap out of it to us.

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.

sp3323• 6 years ago

July 2017 - HTML5 games account for more than 50% of all new games uploaded to Kongregate and almost 50% of the revenue. https://blog.kongregate.com/html5-is-here/

ckocagil3• 6 years ago

50% doesn't mean much when the website itself loses its relevance:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=kongrega...

hombre_fatal4• 6 years ago

You're really barking up the wrong tree here.

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.

GuiA2• 6 years ago

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.

I wonder what the phpBB of social media/smartphone apps would look like.

ars6• 6 years ago

These days, every one of Kongregate's users has a smartphone with free games more accessible and convenient than the old browser gaming model.

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?

azhenley2• 6 years ago

These days, every one of Kongregate's users has a smartphone with free games more accessible and convenient than the old browser gaming model.

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.

cjsawyer2• 6 years ago

I miss forums. Not reddit, but things like vBulletin. It felt like a community of people you would get to know instead of a faceless mass.

zomglings• 6 years ago

People just don't go to Kongregate anymore, the hey day is over.

This is not true. I still play games on Kongregate - a few times a month.

thaumasiotes2• 6 years ago

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 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.

jimmaswell• 6 years ago

a smartphone with free games

"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.

SimianLogic24• 6 years ago

My oldest is 8 and he plays a TON of browser games (no smartphone yet, doesn't have the password to download stuff on his iPad).

SeanDav• 6 years ago

Phone games are largely a nightmarish morass of ads-to-progress and pay-to-win.

Riverheart• 6 years ago

Agreed. I've played free flash games on Kongregate that were better quality and more original than many things you'll pay for on Steam. That said, I've been pleased to find Don't Escape and Deep Sleep on Steam and it's nice to give back. Wish more creators would do that.

azhenley2• 6 years ago

In college I made a living from releasing Flash games that I made during the weekends. Nothing has matched the ease of distributing a Flash game. My games would spread to hundreds of websites with video advertisements in them.

clusterfish• 6 years ago

It went into mobile apps. The browser part didn't matter to most people. So now we have walled gardens.

nabilhat• 6 years ago

Flash is about more than just games, musicals featuring Colin Mochrie, and documentaries about badgers and mushrooms.

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.

mtrower5• 6 years ago

documentaries about badgers and mushrooms

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?

thedirt0115• 6 years ago

I too miss Flash games, but there are still tons and tons of free indie games on the web. Have you checked out itch.io, for example? There are ~90k free HTML5 games [1].

[1] https://itch.io/games/html5

awscherb• 6 years ago

Kongregate, what a trip. I saw 'Kongregate' in the title and thought 'hey, I have games published there!' As a teenager, using MochiAds to get paid for some flash games was absurd - this was something I was just "good at", and honestly, what really introduced me to software development as both a passion and a career.

biryani_chicken• 6 years ago

We now have DOS emulators in the browser[0]. Do that with Flash!

[0] https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games

dmix• 6 years ago

all vendors had to do was to sandbox Flash

If only browser security was so simple.

Cthulhu_• 6 years ago

Where has the entire browser gaming ecosystem gone to?

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

musicale• 6 years ago

I think Jobs was right about Flash, but you are also right about Flash; the browser game ecosystem was nice.

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.

Causality12• 6 years ago

If they want to become a mainstream game developer, gutting an established fanbase and community seems counterproductive.

jpt4• 6 years ago

The Immortal Grand Prix flash game from 2003 [0] was the single best turn based tactics game I've yet encountered online. Does anyone know whether it is still hosted somewhere, how one might self host Flash games (assuming one had the Shockwave files), or of games comparable to this one?

[0] https://youtu.be/VGxhmhNJ9qo

madrox• 6 years ago

End of an era. Browser gaming is a shadow of its former glory. Many of the best mobile games started as flash games here. Then Steve Jobs declared war on Flash and made in-app purchase games possible. Now casual games are the pay-to-win nonsense you see on the App Store.

If free markets are truly what is best for consumers, then casual gaming isn’t a free market.

dlbucci• 6 years ago

I remember joining there when they announced they would have medals (Xbox 360 achievements had just become a thing, and were big). Played a lot of great games and had some fun chatting, too! But the one I maybe think of the most is Desktop Tower Defense (1.5, maybe?), as it was all the rage when I joined. Christ, that was 13 years ago! Gonna have to revisit that soon, I suppose...

TedDoesntTalk3• 6 years ago

Certain ... forums ... will be removed from the site

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.

SenoraRaton• 6 years ago

Is not the post you just posted on a "forum"

A rose by any other name is still a rose.

TedDoesntTalk3• 6 years ago

Yep. And read my comment about HN at the end.

aetherspawn• 6 years ago

This is true of a game development community that I made about 2500 contributions to (had a goal of making 5-6 meaningful posts per day).

They migrated their software and the accounts became unlinked to the previous contributions. In the last 7 years, I contributed only 40 more times.

mtrower5• 6 years ago

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?

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.

KiDD• 6 years ago

Oooof.

I Loved Kongregate Games!

smrk007• 6 years ago

How feasible would it be to clone the entirety of the website? (Scrape games, recreate all functionality, etc.)

frenchie4111• 6 years ago

RIP. I got my start in software engineering building and publishing (crappy) games to Kongregate. It was a wonderful site, and it will be missed.

Rotdhizon• 6 years ago

This is upsetting to see but not surprising. As a daily Kong user, the website has been going downhill hard over the past decade. Especially over these last 3-5 years, it's been a wasteland of terrible quality games. In it's early days, Kong was a fantastic place to be. Friendly communities and amazing games. Especially the earlier RPGs and MMOs. I had such fun on the older MMOs that have all since been such down. From AA:TG, Odin Quest, Call of Gods, RotMG, and more. Kong was a huge part of my teenage years.

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.

winrid• 6 years ago

I still remember loading up Kitty Cannon over dial up in the farm house in our small town of seven in Western PA.

Nostalgia.

RIP Kongregate.

grammarnazzzi• 6 years ago

I feel like a friend just died.

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:

tarkin22• 6 years ago

Flash posed a threat to Apple’s walled garden.

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.

Pulcinella• 6 years ago

Can’t you still open a browser tab? Web apps do exist. How is that any different?

tarkin22• 6 years ago

As mentioned elsewhere, the experience flash gave has never been beat in most cases.

libraryatnight• 6 years ago

Sad to see Flash going out like this. It was such an easy tool for any creative to put to use and then share the result.

blitztime• 6 years ago

This is very sad news. I spent a great deal of time in my childhood playing games on Kongregate. I remember reading strategy guides for Kongai, their CCG that admitted wasn't very good but I always tried to complete the game challenges to earn that weeks Kongai card.

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.

SimianLogic24• 6 years ago

My dream has always been for one of the consoles to buy the scraps of Flash from Adobe, add good controller/save support, and then open it up to developers to make 2D games. Having shipped games in Java, Flash/AS3, haxe, objective c, swift, javascript, unity -- I've never been as productive and happy as when I was using Flash. Swift/SpriteKit is pretty nice, but I'm tired of the Apple treadmill and seeing my games die after a few years unless I put more work into them.

timvdalen• 6 years ago

I've got to say, I still visit kong every couple of days to see if there are any cool new games. I will miss it.

Kongregate closed to new games, shutting down forums and chat

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