Kongregate Newsroom (Page 30)

Analytics Sep 20, 2016

Quest for Progress: Numbers Behind Idle Games

A more in-depth version of this short post is available at The Math of Idle Games, Part I [https://blog.kongregate.com/the-math-of-idle-games-part-i]. At GDC Europe this year I gave a talk that took a deeper look at some of the numbers, formulas, and patterns underlying idle games. The slides for the talk are on Slideshare [http://www.slideshare.net/AnthonyPecorella/quest-for-progress-gdc-europe-2016] and the GDC Vault, if you have access there. In the slides you’ll find information about gro

Kongregate News Sep 15, 2016

Kongregate’s 'Animation Throwdown: The Quest for Cards' mobile game launches today on iOS & Android!

San Francisco, Calif., September 15, 2016 – Order up! Animation Throwdown: The Quest for Cards is now available globally on iOS and Android. Animation Throwdown: The Quest for Cards is the only collectible card game featuring five hit Twentieth Century Fox animated comedies: American Dad!, Bob’s Burgers, Family Guy, Futurama, and King of the Hill. For the first time ever, players get to assemble their favorite characters and experience iconic show moments in the ultimate deck-building game of

Monetization Sep 08, 2016

eCPM Decay in Rewarded Video Ads

Some of you have heard the term "eCPM decay." Let's first understand what it means. If you are a publisher, CPM is the revenue you are getting for 1,000 impressions. If an advertiser is paying you a CPM of $5 and you show your users 1,000 impressions of that ad, you will receive $5. The advertising world is slightly more complex, however; most of the advertisers are actually paying CPI -- in other words, they are paying for installs. This means that unless the user clicks on an ad and installs t

Engineering Sep 01, 2016

Optimizing Games for Low-End Devices

One of the biggest challenges in mobile game development is having your game run great on a low-end device without compromising the experience on a high-end one. We tend to optimize and budget the best experience for our high-end devices. There are many good reasons for this: better monetization, better engagement, etc. Low-end devices seem to run away from us in scope and get poorly prioritized because of the focus on high-end devices. But they’re still important! According to a recent Mixpanel

Game Development Aug 23, 2016

What Some Experienced Developers Learned from Making Their First Game

In a thread in the Game Programming forum on Kongregate, a developer working on his first game [http://www.kongregate.com/accounts/mrflibble] asked experienced developers in our community what they learned from making their first game and what they would do differently if they had the opportunity to start over again. The thread can be read here [https://www.kongregate.com/forums/4-game-programming/topics/642680-what-did-you-learn-from-your-first-game] , but we also wanted to highlight some comm

Culture Aug 18, 2016

Engineering Personas

A few weeks ago, Kongregate CRO Josh Larson related the diversity of our company [https://blog.kongregate.com/the-sorting-hat-at-kongregate] as identified by an activity of having people take a Hogwart’s sorting hat quiz. We found out that, without any conscious effort, we had a relatively evenly distributed team. While this exercise was mostly done for fun, it does highlight a key concept to building a successful team: How do you balance the strengths and weaknesses of individuals to propel the

Game Development Aug 11, 2016

More Terrible Games, Please

I’m an intern here at Kongregate, which means that my responsibilities are varied and almost completely uninteresting to read about (but I’m not about to let a little thing like that stop me). For the past week or two, I’ve been spending most of my time combing through hundreds of old games, weeding out anything that seems broken or miscategorized. It’s very time-consuming, and although it can be tedious to wade through a tidal wave of unplayable games, it can feel like I’m uncovering bizarre ar

Kongregate News Aug 10, 2016

A New Home for Our Documentation

Our documentation now at docs.kongregate.com [https://docs.kongregate.com]. Some of you will notice today that we moved our documentation to a new platform (on readme.io). Besides a cleaner interface, it allows us to provide some pretty useful tools within the docs, such as: * An interactive API Explorer where you can make test calls to our APIs * A community driven support hub [http://docs.kongregate.com/discuss] where you can ask questions and request features *

Monetization Aug 04, 2016

5 Tips to Improve Game-as-a-Service Monetization

Written by Moonlit Wang, Partner Development Manager at Google Play Games, & Tammy Levy, Director of Product for Mobile at Kongregate Free-to-play games are essentially games-as-a-service. The lifetime value of these players is much more complex to calculate than it was when a game’s player LTV was simply the purchase price of a game. We understand that the LTV is directly related to how much time players spend in the game, since long-term players spend more money, but how do we design a game t