Using Kongregate To Make Money For Your Indie Game…

Using Kongregate to Make Money For Your Indie Game…

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/kongregate-podcast.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the Game Developers Conference and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Greg: Hi, my name is Greg Mcclanahan. I work for Kongregate. I do all of the sponsorships for games, and I also do all of the breaking game achievements on the site.

Interviewer: Can you talk about the benefits or what Kongregate offers to indie game developers?

Greg: Kongregate offers a lot of stuff for indie game developers. We offer ad revenue share on the site. We offer cash prizes for the top rated games. We also offer a lot of exposure for developers on the site, and we offer a lot of ways for developers to interact with users on the site through the forums, comments, reports, that sort of thing.

Interviewer: How popular are these chat options and forum options and stuff like that for games?

Greg: They are pretty popular. It’s pretty common for the more popular games to get forum posts, people talking about them, making a lot of conversation. Developers can jump in there and also talk about what is going on.

Interviewer: How hard is it to implement those features that you’re talking about or to use them on the site?

Greg: It’s not hard at all. All you have to do is just upload a switch and then you’re automatically implemented with chat. You can upload update reports to receive those automatically. You can email your comments. The only thing you really have to go out of your way to implement is our API which enables the achievements within your game.

Interviewer: Are achievements very popular? Is that something that attracts a lot of people or how is that?

Greg: Yes, achievements are extremely popular; in fact, it’s probably one of the defining features of Kongregate that it keeps people coming back.

Interviewer: I guess in terms of ad revenue, what’s the potential? Well, does it have to be a flash file done that indie gamer submits, or what do game developers submit?

Greg: Technically, we support flash and shockwave though our shockwave means honestly it don’t do quite as well as Flash. Through contests and ad revenue the most successful games on the site definitely have the potential to earn only a few thousand dollars just for being uploaded.

Interviewer: And, you also talked about exposure. Is that another benefit then of putting on Kongregate?

Greg: Yeah, Kongregate is actually a pretty well known seed site for a lot of other sites. If you want your game to start on the web and you upload it to Carney without any sidewalks or anything and it’s doing well, basically, a lot of sites will grab the swift directly and repost it. For a lot of developers this is actually something they look for to get maximum exposure for their games that are on the web.

Interviewer: Do you have any tips for indie game developers on how they can make a successful game or games that you – types of games that you see have worked well with the audiences of Kongregate?

Greg: Yeah, start with a really simple, really fun mechanic. Just kind of mess around. Find something that’s just really basic that just has no art work, that’s really fun to play around with and then work at building a game around that. Just a quick little hook, just something to get the player interested, you know, addicted. That’s, I think, the games that do well, just something with a really interesting mechanic at its core, not really a game that’s just trying to do with consoles do.

Interviewer: Can you talk about multi-player and whether that’s popular on Kongregate, or is that something that is being implemented on Kongregate?

Greg: Multi-player games are pretty popular. Multi-players games are definitely the games that have the longest longevity on Kongregate. They just don’t get the initial spike and then drop in traffic. We have our own funded premium games that are all multi-players that we started releasing and are just coming out.

Interviewer: Do you have any virtual worlds on Kongregate?

Greg: Virtual worlds? No, not really.

Interviewer: Cool. Anything else you want to say to indie game developers out there about Kongregate?

Greg: Just upload your game. Implement the API.

Interviewer: Sounds good. Thank you very much.