Ideation and Process from Drew Hambke, Director of Marketing, Kongregate.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what brought me to Kongregate back in the day and the content that kept me around. I was an avid user of Kongregate when Gamestop owned it, and becoming an employee reminded me of those things.

Our audience has a lot of nostalgia for the good old days when we could spend a lot of time enjoying new games and having community interactions you couldn’t find anywhere else. Sites like Kongregate opened up the doors for indie developers because it was a great way of generating some revenue for your titles, getting a decent-sized audience, and getting feedback. All of these things are vital for small developers.

I appreciate video games as a form of art. I like to see what developers intended while they were creating the piece and the message they were trying to send.

As I get older, I have less time to put toward playing video games, so when I am, I want them to be unique experiences, something that I get an emotional response from. And I did that on Kongregate, playing games like Epic Battle Fantasy, Tower Defense Desktop 2, and the first of the Bloons games. I enjoyed it, I had a good experience online, and I’ve been thinking about how we can do that on Web3.

As much as our existing community likes the nostalgia of Kongregate and the brand, I think it’s important for every brand to consider its identity and think about where they’re going next. When Kongregate started, it was a large platform where people could post games, find a community, and interact with each other. While that vision has held true for a long time (and still does), it’s good to update the branding, and logo, and make sure that people know that we’re experimenting in an area of tech that’s new. Our core audience has gotten a bit older, and we want to show them the growth and depth we have. We’re not just some old website: we have mobile games that we publish, we do marketing for other companies, and we are in web3. We are still a good wholesome place online to find good games to play, but we’re also evolving for the future.

Partially because there is no single platform right now for those looking for web3 games, and we want to have a platform where people know they can find a catered experience — one with a team of developers and people behind it that want to provide a good experience.

We want to do for Web3 what we did for Web2.

This is an opportunity for us to upgrade the tech, solve some long-standing issues, provide a better experience, showcase the best hits of our past, and make it easy for our fans to find the games that they want to spend a lot of time in. It’s also a chance to tailor the site so it’s more useful for us when we’re directing people towards new developers and new experiences.

The idea to rebrand and relaunch our platform existed in our CTO’s head 5 to 10 years ago, beginning as all good ideas do.

It starts with the spark of an idea, then pitching it, throwing spaghetti at the wall — we’ve gone through several different exercises trying to figure out what branding we want and what sort of message we want to say about the future. We’ve gotten pretty silly with it, but we settled on a clear vision that maintains the features our community knows and loves while allowing us to showcase some new things in a cool format. One thing that’s been constant throughout all of it is the Kongpanions — they’re adorable and they will be adorable forever.

We care about where we come from, but we’re also aware gaming is changing. We want our fans to find a good experience with us and know they can trust us to deliver a solid enjoyable experience with a healthy supportive community.

Drew Hambke is the Director of Marketing at Kongregate. He oversees brand marketing efforts, creative efforts, and performance marketing.