Nice. This has passed under my radar.

So… I new it was an old new idea.

(although there was no “submit game” nor description of the business model, so it’s hard to say how it works for the developers. From the player perspective, it seems exactly the same)

Also players gain “experience points” for voting on games and for achieving badges in games (not all games have badges).

And the site does not allow games to have in-game advertisements on their site (other than of course credits for developers etc at the start of a game, relevant logos etc. It’s very fair IMO).

Basically Kongregate is awesome.

There are a few problems with this. The first is that as a developer, other games are “the enemy”. If someone goes to try a new game, that cuts into my revenue. You can’t just base revenue on time played, otherwise then the game design revolves around keeping people in the game as long as possible. (Skotos also had people rate games which affected revenue cuts, which presented its own problems.)

I think the biggest problem here is how to split revenues fairly. At least for an MMO, we made a lot more money per user running our own servers because we weren’t splitting revenues with other games. I suspect that your idea would become like Flash game portals are right now: Where you put a cute little game, trying to lure people back to your site so they can play your games. Or, rather, a site where you stuff ads into your games and let them get played all over the place to give you more revenue. Any any rate, doesn’t sound great for the person running the service….

I’m not sure if services like this exist outside of the US, but there are alot of these neat online music services that basically are the same as what you said. Except they have DRM and expire if you quit the subscription. However, there are a few that let you “Keep forever” a certain number of songs per month. So you would pay the monthly fee, download a bunch of music, then keep the ones you like.

I personally don’t use a service like this (I use Amazon MP3, no DRM so it works on my modded Nintendo DS I use for a MP3 player) but they do sound interesting to me.

~DtD

So how do I get an audience? A portal would be a great way.

My current project, Battle City (http://battlecity.looble.com) is a multiplayer online game. I would be interested in a portal for multiplayer games, with a central login system. You login to a big chat-room, and see a list of all the games you can play and which of your friends are online.

This would be great because if such a portal existed and my game was added to it, suddenly the game would be exposed to a big audience of players. Getting past the hurdle of finding players would be a huge step forward.