Hello everyone! I’m Arbiter Rex, a Kongregate dev and long-time video game creator and enjoyer.

You might have seen me lurking in the #just-chatting room of the Kongregate Discord or leading our Blood Vessels project last year.

This year, I’m taking on the exciting challenge of renewing Kongregate.com - working on everything from our upcoming Kred- sales to new badges, new achievements, and a whole lot more!

You may have noticed a recent influx of badges on the site along with new games, and I wanted to chat a bit about all these new and exciting updates.

These are thrilling times for us, developing the Kongregate platform. We’re working on building relationships with game devs, both new and old, as well as infusing the whole website with fresh life. We’re trying new things like livestreams, and looking at other ways to engage more directly with our community.

As part of the effort to warm the engines of the platform, we decided to revisit badges and how we treated them. In the past, a game on Kongregate would get 1-4 achievements. At that time Kongregate was receiving and publishing a lot more games and we couldn’t expect our users to dig deep into every game. Since closing game submissions we haven’t added new games or achievements to the site until recently.

STUG landed as one of our first brand-new games and in an effort to help build excitement around it, our team requested a large batch of badges from the devs. In the past, we had a lot of games, with few badges. With STUG we wanted to challenge that expectation and see if adding more badges created a deeper overall gameplay experience for a Kongregate user. That’s why we’re excited to say that STUG has a whopping 39 achievements!

Does that mean that every game will be getting ~40 badges? Not necessarily! We’re testing out different formats and working to balance Kongregate’s overall metagame. We’ve been seeing your reactions to our changes and have been using that feedback to make adjustments to our strategies moving forward. Please keep letting us know how you feel, and remember that we love Kongregate.com as much as you.

You may also notice older games getting infused with new achievements and it's for the same reasons as above. We want to highlight favorites, oldies and the gems of our collection with fresh badges. Animation Throwdown, Crush Crush, Idling to Rule the Gods, and Raid Heroes: Total War are all games that have had new achievements added to them to remind our users they exist and are fun, and to help drive new users to give them a try.

But new achievements and games aren’t all! Have you looked at Spellstone lately? We’re working on adding Discord integration to the site. Keep your eyes peeled for other changes small or big.

Do you have feedback about this?  Let us know here!

More soon, but until then… Happy Gaming!