Guest Post - Kongregate Developers Blog

Guest Post Jun 28, 2018
7 Things You Should Be Aware of Before You Make Your First Game

This week's guest post is from plarium.com, the home of top online MMO games. Making a game is challenging, but thanks to modern technology and software development, anyone with the passion and dedication to learning the trade can make something playable and (more importantly) enjoyable. However, it takes a long time, and a lot of experience before the average person can start creating something people will want to invest a fair amount of money and time in. We all dream of creating the next Elder Scrolls epic or Far Cry adventure, but the truth is you need to start small. This means curbing your enthusiasm appropriately and focusing on a project which you know you can handle to the best of your ability. Your first game will have a lot of bugs; it might not even be very playable. But none of that matters -- at least for now -- you just need to see that you can actually manage to complete a full game. So whether it is a small team of individuals working from a small office

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Guest Post Aug 24, 2017
Guest Post: Growing a Gaming Community (Before You Have Players)

This article was written by Nathan Lovato and originally posted on GameAnalytics.com. When you get started with social networks, it’s tough. Nobody follows you. Nobody reads you. Nobody knows you! How do other game developers get those thousands of followers? 2 years ago, no one knew me either. I was terrible at communication, and I didn’t like it. Back then, I had failed a company, largely due to a lack of online presence. And today? Not only do I enjoy the exchanges with the community every day: I learned to communicate the hard way and it paid off. With a niche concept in game design education, I’ve got 30 000 Youtube subscribers, 50 more every day, and companies who come to me with job offers. Thanks to them all, I’m fully independent. When it comes to getting visibility, there’s no short answer. No definitive formula to drive the people’s interest. It’s hard, it takes time, and it’s a unique skill you must develop and hone. That’s why we got in

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Monetization Oct 20, 2016
From a Dev: Optimizing Ad Revenue Through Gameplay Experiences

The following article is meant to highlight Ultrabit’s experience with ads and how we integrated them into our core gameplay to drive meaningful revenue. I will be speaking primarily about our latest title, Pocket Politics (iOS and Android, July 2016). Although Pocket Politics sits in the idle/incremental genre, we believe ads can drive meaningful results in almost any game category. This will not be an exhaustive examination of all ads ever; instead, it is a single illustration of how we’ve found success with our current approach. If you haven’t thought about how ads might help drive more revenue from your products, we hope the below encourages you to explore ads as a secondary means of monetization. If you are already seeing gains from your current ad implementation, we hope you come away with ideas on how to further optimize. Why do we care so much about ads? Ads serve as a major pillar of revenue for Pocket Politics. At any given time we make 40-50% of our daily revenues from ads, which has proven especially significant

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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 the app, the publisher doesn't receive any revenue. What eCPM decay means is that if you take a certain user and show him more ads, he is not necessarily going to install more apps, so you wouldn't receive more money as a result. Simple Example of eCPM Decay Let's think of this scenario: You have a single user in a given day He wants to get 1 life for free, so he watches a video -- you as a publisher don't get paid for that

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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 artifacts that no one has touched in a long time. I haven’t played No Man’s Sky yet, but I’m sure the feeling is very similar. Unlike No Man’s Sky (I hope), the variation starts to run out of steam very quickly. Sure, there are plenty of great, unique games in there, but everyone knows about those already. Those are classics. The untouched artifacts that I’m talking about here are of a much different, much more specific breed: WebGL Pong clones. I see dozens and dozens

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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 to retain players and monetize effectively? Google Play and Kongregate teamed up to answer this question with 5 tips to improve monetization in F2P games. To learn more, please visit this post on Google’s Developer Blog.

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