Kongregate Newsroom (Page 33)

Community Mar 31, 2016

Crisis and Community

The following article is based on Janet Ebsen's "Crisis and Opportunity" GDC talk [https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023451/Crisis-and-Opportunity-Communities-in]. Shortly after I became Kongregate's community manager, Kongregate had one of the biggest community crises in our history. One of our games had a cascading series of problems involving last-minute changes to events, insufficiently described odds of winning a very rare item, and some support missteps. By the time players came to us, their

Game Development Mar 29, 2016

Effective Testing of F2P Games

Mobile games have become increasingly high-stakes over the last few years. Successful games make billions, but most games launch to failure, and few get a second chance from either platforms or players. Most developers test their games in various ways, from individual playtest sessions to geo-locked launches in Canada and Australia. But many games still launch with poor retention, monetization, tech problems, or some combination of the three. What's going wrong? Kongregate has now put more than

Engineering Mar 24, 2016

Publishing Unity WebGL Games on Kongregate

The quick and painful [https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/6213033?hl=en] death of the Unity Web Player has left many browser game developers scrambling to update and publish their content using Unity’s new HTML5 WebGL target. Now that Unity 5.3 is quite stable, we are recommending developers publish both Web Player and WebGL builds when hosting their games on Kongregate. Even though Unity 5.4 will remove support for the Web Player [http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/10/08/unity-web-player-roa

Game Development Mar 18, 2016

Idle Chatter: GDC 2016

These are the slides from Anthony Pecorella's talk about idle games at GDC this year. Idle Chatter - GDC 2016 [http://www.slideshare.net/AnthonyPecorella/idle-chatter-gdc-2016-59734260] from Anthony Pecorella [http://www.slideshare.net/AnthonyPecorella]

Engineering Mar 17, 2016

Timeline of Modern Browser NPAPI Support

While browser games remain a popular format for game development, the technology behind browser games has been changing quickly over the past few years. Back in 2013 [http://blog.chromium.org/2013/09/saying-goodbye-to-our-old-friend-npapi.html], Chrome announced that it would be dropping support for the Netscape Plug-in API (NPAPI) due to concerns about the browser's security, speed, and stability. Skipping ahead a bit, Chrome version 45 launched on September 1st of last year, removing support f

Monetization Mar 10, 2016

Using New Buyer Packs to Enhance Player Experience and Increase Conversion

Standard store items, hard currency sales, and limited-time promotions may provide a consistent revenue boost for your game at a high level. But what type of players are buying those items? More often than not, the players making purchases are veteran players who have made several purchases already, while most of the overall playerbase has yet to convert. New Buyer Packs (NBPs) are a great way to get new players to convert to paying players. An optimal combination of pricing, timing, and value

Monetization Mar 04, 2016

Offerwall Performance Case Study

We recently looked at the performance of an offerwall in one of our mid-core titles and found it’s primarily utilized by non-payers and found a significant boost in the purchase rates of non-payers who engage with an offerwall, with no negative impact to retention or gameplay rates. Generally speaking, it’s almost all additive revenue! Offerwalls are typically placed in the game store and reward users with hard currency for completing an offer of the user's choice. Offers can range from simple

Monetization Mar 01, 2016

Best Practices: In-Game Ads

Advertising in games has proven to be a great source of revenue for game developers. In many cases, ads increase the revenue baseline and provide the ability to monetize genres that historically hadn’t monetize before, such as endless runners and roguelikes. In preparation for Kongregate’s presentation at Casual Connect [https://blog.kongregate.com/in-game-ads/], we did a deep dive into the performance of ads in most of our titles. With only 20 minutes to present, we were only able to cover the

Engineering Feb 26, 2016

AWS Lambda for CloudFormation Stack Dependencies

Kongregate’s infrastructure is represented entirely in code via AWS CloudFormation. CloudFormation is a templating system built by AWS for managing their infrastructure as code; you can read more about CloudFormation here [https://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/]. Since Kongregate’s infrastructure is entirely in code, it has been necessary to solve a number of limitations in the CloudFormation structure. One such limitation in CloudFormation is cross stack dependencies. When defining entire infr