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Analytics
Don’t Rush Your A/B Test!

If you have been working in game development for a while I have no doubt that you’ve used A/B testing at least once. It’s a powerful tool, allowing you to check various hypotheses with data before introducing any changes to the entire game’s user base. There is no space for gut-feeling here; we should rely only on pure numbers. Sounds pretty straightforward -- could anything go wrong? Apparently, it could. In the world of A/B testing there are a lot of pitfalls. Here is a

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Game Development
Exploring Motivation: Why People Play Games for Years

Retention is the most important metric for a free-to-play mobile game’s long-term business outlook. If you want to understand the link between a player’s lifetime value (how much money they ever spend in the game) and how long they continue to play your game, Emily Greer gave a GDC talk in 2013 absolutely packed with web data. This post will expand on that talk by highlighting some game systems in Kongregate’s mobile publishing portfolio that we’ve seen successfully drive long-term player retention. It will also highlight

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Kongregate News
The Trail: Frontier Challenge Is Now on Steam

Journey across land and sea in an epic adventure in The Trail: Frontier Challenge, now available on Steam! From legendary game developer Peter Molyneux and 22Cans, The Trail: Frontier Challenge takes players to a new world where they’ll collect, craft, and trade in an unexplored land as they journey to Eden Falls, a bustling frontier town. As you amass fortune and notoriety, you'll work together with other players to build a thriving community in Eden Falls and ultimately become the Mayor of the most successful town in the new

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Analytics Aug 17, 2017
Don’t Rush Your A/B Test!

If you have been working in game development for a while I have no doubt that you’ve used A/B testing at least once. It’s a powerful tool, allowing you to check various hypotheses with data before introducing any changes to the entire game’s user base. There is no space for gut-feeling here; we should rely only on pure numbers. Sounds pretty straightforward -- could anything go wrong? Apparently, it could. In the world of A/B testing there are a lot of pitfalls. Here is a list of the most common ones: Running the A/B test without a clear hypothesis and metric to measure Jumping to conclusions before getting statistical significance Uneven distribution in the variants between geos, platforms and whatnot Incorrect implementation of the A/B test conditions Issues with the correct assignment of an A/B test group Too short of an A/B test (i.e. one day only), resulting in biased data In this article we will be focusing on the issues caused by rushed decisions. Here at Kongregate, we care

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Kongregate News Aug 16, 2017
The Trail: Frontier Challenge Is Now on Steam

Journey across land and sea in an epic adventure in The Trail: Frontier Challenge, now available on Steam! From legendary game developer Peter Molyneux and 22Cans, The Trail: Frontier Challenge takes players to a new world where they’ll collect, craft, and trade in an unexplored land as they journey to Eden Falls, a bustling frontier town. As you amass fortune and notoriety, you'll work together with other players to build a thriving community in Eden Falls and ultimately become the Mayor of the most successful town in the new frontier. The Trail was originally launched on mobile, but has been completely redesigned for a wholly PC audience with new challenges, character skill trees, and more strategic gameplay. PC players will also have to contend with the weather; extreme cold will require travelers to eat additional food, while muddy terrain can slow their progress. Play The Trail: Frontier Challenge on Steam today! The game is regularly priced at $14.99, but is currently 10% off in celebration of its launch. For more information on The Trail, follow the official game

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Game Development Aug 10, 2017
Exploring Motivation: Why People Play Games for Years

Retention is the most important metric for a free-to-play mobile game’s long-term business outlook. If you want to understand the link between a player’s lifetime value (how much money they ever spend in the game) and how long they continue to play your game, Emily Greer gave a GDC talk in 2013 absolutely packed with web data. This post will expand on that talk by highlighting some game systems in Kongregate’s mobile publishing portfolio that we’ve seen successfully drive long-term player retention. It will also highlight the core motivations created by each game and discuss how that system ties into that motivation. An excellent resource on the subject is Quantic Foundry's 2017 GDC talk on the anatomy of player motivations. AdVenture Capitalist offers a simple promise that any fan of idle games can appreciate: click more, get more powerful. Quantic Foundry's talk highlighted idle games in particular as incredible motivators for people who are motivated by the accumulation of power and the desire to complete every quest and collect every achievement. There are hundreds of idle

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Kongregate News Aug 09, 2017
Kongregate Announces $10 Million PC & Console Fund to Expand Cross-Platform Publishing Initiative

San Francisco, CA (August 9, 2017) -- Kongregate, a leading game publisher, today announced a new $10 million initiative to help fund promising PC and console titles from independent developers to continue Kongregate’s expansion into cross-platform publishing. This fund is inclusive of both paid and free-to-play titles. This fund complements Kongregate’s push onto PC and console, and provides independent developers customized marketing, financial assistance, and production support. As both a premium and free-to-play publisher, Kongregate positions itself to provide and nurture a wider group of indie developers and their titles. Specific benefits to developers include: Platform relationship management Marketing support including paid UA, PR, and social influencer campaigns Game analytics and performance benchmarking Expo presence at major and developer-local events Design and build consulting QA and certification support Localization and technology expertise Kongregate launched its first original title, GRIDD: Retroenhanced, on Steam and Xbox One and is following it up with Peter Molyneux’s The Trail: Frontier Challenge and Super Fancy Pants Adventure, based on the popular web game franchise, both coming later this summer. Both games are

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Engineering Aug 03, 2017
Death to Flashy

Let me tell you a tale about an initiative to reduce Flash dependencies on what used to be a "Flash gaming" site. This is the story about a large-scale project with the best possible outcome being that users don't notice any changes, and the worst possible outcome of everything breaking horribly. This, my friends, is the story of Kongregate's Death to Flashy initiative. In the Beginning When we first started building Kongregate, we didn't have to worry much about whether or not users had Flash installed. It was very much ubiquitous, and since you couldn't play most of the games on the site without it we could build features based on the assumption that Flash was available. We built our chat client in Flash, we created APIs for both ActionScript 2 and 3, games implemented them, and all was good. For a very long time, the vast majority of the games on Kongregate were made with Flash, even most of our externally hosted "iframe" games. Some of these external games eventually needed a way to interact with Kongregate via JavaScript,

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Marketing Aug 02, 2017
How to Market a Game Profitably

Jeff Gurian, Kongregate's VP of Marketing and Ad Monetization, recently did a podcast with Appmasters, a mobile marketing agency specializing in growth hacking for independent developers. Jeff talks with Appmasters founder Steve Young about a wide range of topics including how to effectively market a mobile game, ad monetization tips, the rigorous marketability testing Kongregate performs, and what Kongregate looks for in both games and developers they publish titles with. The full Appmasters podcast can be found here.

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Kongregate News Jul 26, 2017
GRIDD: Retroenhanced Now on Xbox One

We at Kongregate are incredibly excited to be launching GRIDD: Retroenhanced on Xbox One today! GRIDD is a unique mix of anti-gravity racing fused with an old-school arcade shooter, currently with a 93% positive rating on Steam! GRIDD is Antab Studio's love letter to games, hacking movies, and cyberpunk culture that emerged from the 1980s, imagining what a hardcore coin-op game would be like if we had today's technology back in the heyday of arcades. It's Kongregate's first title published to console, and we're excited to bring more in the future! “Since crossing our ten-year anniversary in 2016, one of our main goals as a publisher has been to support our developers by offering their unique gameplay experiences across multiple platforms. Our expansion to mobile and Steam has been successful, and now we plan to continue that momentum by releasing games on consoles,” said Emily Greer, co-founder and CEO of Kongregate. “GRIDD is an exciting re-imagining of the classic arcade shooter with advanced graphics and gameplay enhancements perfect for fans of the Xbox One platform.” GRIDD: Retroenhanced is available now

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Kongregate News Jul 26, 2017
Fancy Pants Man Is Running to Steam

Super Fancy Pants Adventure, the definitive title in the Fancy Pants saga, is coming to Steam this August! This modern reboot of the series brings incredibly fluid parkour-inspired platforming to Steam for the first time. Super Fancy Pants Adventure will be the fourth and most fully featured entry in the beloved franchise. Players will be able to slide, jump, and hack-and-slash their weapon through enemies across 56 all-new levels and 7 unique worlds. Discover hidden items throughout each world to upgrade Fancy Pants Man and unlock new abilities. Played more than 100 million times worldwide, Fancy Pants is a labor of love created solely by one developer, Brad Borne. Brad has done all of the art and programming himself throughout the franchise, even writing the core platforming code. Thanks to his attention to detail, the game has been meticulously drawn frame-by-frame and animated by hand! You can wishlist Super Fancy Pants Adventure today on Steam to receive notifications when it launches this August. For more information on the game follow the official game channels on Twitter & Facebook.

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Mobile Publishing Jul 20, 2017
Challenge Accepted! "The Trail: Frontier Challenge" Coming Soon to Steam

Are you ready to discover the undiscovered? Are you ready to climb the tallest mountains, wear the finest clothes, and earn a fortune beyond compare? Then welcome to the New World! Welcome to Peter Molyneux’s The Trail: Frontier Challenge, launching this summer on Steam! The Trail: Frontier Challenge is an innovative game in which players from across the globe can explore together as they collect, craft, trade, and journey to Eden Falls, a frontier town just beyond a vast mountain range. As players amass fortune and notoriety, they work together to build a thriving community in Eden Falls and ultimately become the leader of the most successful town in the new frontier. The Trail was originally launched on mobile, but has been completely rebuilt and redesigned for a wholly PC audience by including challenges, character skill upgrade trees, and more strategic gameplay. “Our goal with The Trail: Frontier Challenge was to take the core gameplay and narrative of The Trail on mobile, and reimagine it for Steam players,” said Peter Molyneux, Creative Director, 22cans. “PC players are looking for

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Game Development Jul 19, 2017
HTML5 Is Here

HTML5 has been hailed as the future of gaming in web browsers for years. Back in 2011, however, HTML5 was running into headwinds due to issues with performance and compatibility. There was general optimism about the technology, but few were willing to adopt it for their own games. Things became more urgent recently, though, with the deprecation of NPAPI plugins (i.e. Unity, Java, Silverlight, etc.) and an ominous cloud hanging over the long-term viability of Flash. So where are we now? For context on the following data, Kongregate.com has had 500-1500 games uploaded every month for nearly a decade, with over 100,000 games to date. We’ve often been known as a “Flash” platform because Flash dominated other technologies, but we’ve actually been an open, technology-agnostic web platform since 2007, also supporting Java and Shockwave early on. We were the first platform to officially support Unity, long before it was ubiquitous, starting in 2011, and we also built native support for HTML5 in 2013. All of this puts us in a unique position to have a

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Game Development Jul 06, 2017
Working with Intellectual Property: It's Freakin' Sweet, I Tell Ya H'what

Over the last 7 years I’ve worked on a variety of Facebook and mobile games; a handful of them were with different celebrities and intellectual properties (IPs). I've been working on Animation Throwdown: The Quest for Cards at Kongregate for the past two years. I joined during pre-production, saw it through launch, and continue to support it through live servicing. Animation Throwdown is a card-battling game that incorporates the worlds of 5 animated properties from Fox: Family Guy, American Dad, Futurama, Bob's Burgers, and King of the Hill. Before Kongregate, I was a producer on Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff at TinyCo. Before that, I worked as a designer and producer on a variety of projects with celebrities and brands at Grab Games: Baby and Me (working with Brooke Burke and ModernMom.com), Brad Paisley World for Facebook, and a few other games that were never released. Partnership First of all, these projects are partnerships. You get to work on amazing properties that have a fan base who cares deeply about that property and, if you’re lucky,

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Analytics Jun 29, 2017
Retention Primer

Retention is an important metric to look at when predicting the success of a game. The general definition of retention is how many players have stayed in a game on a given day relative to when they first started playing, but as you'll see below, there are several ways to calculate this. When evaluating games, retention is one of the key pieces of information that we're looking at. Strong retention coupled with strong monetization is the real winning combo, but strong retention won't mean the same thing for every game. The baseline of good metrics for a CCG will be very different from the baseline of metrics for an idle game, but before comparing across different genres or games, you have to understand what's being measured. It is important to understand that different analytics platforms calculate this differently. A true comparison can only happen when the calculation is the same; due to this it is important to know the source of your data. It is also worth noting that different platforms will label these differently. Hard Retention (Kong Preferred) How

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