The Kongregate game portal is gradually moving away from publishing ambitions and is paying more and more attention to internal development. According to the company’s management, now it intends to focus on creating idle games popular among its users. Many of the new projects will be made under license.
Tammy Levy, Kongregate’s product director, told VentureBeat about this in an interview. According to him, the company decided to stop at idle games partly because it is well acquainted with them. The first such title for Kongregate was AdVenture Capitalist, which she released back in 2014.
We are excited not only to continue using the idle games format, but also to be able to move it forward.
Kongregate Product Director
Levy noted that Kongregate is not going to develop only light casual idle games. The company also plans to make several midcore idle titles and a number of hardcore projects with short gaming sessions. Among the latter, most likely, there will be collectible card games.
Levy also stressed that a significant part of the portal’s new games will be based on some “global franchises”. But Kongregate has not yet disclosed which IP these games will be made on. However, recall that last year the portal bought three old Disney titles at once: Maleficent Free Fall, Inside Out: Thought Bubbles and Where’s My Water? 2. The company plans to develop them further.
The announcement of Kongregate games should take place in the near future. It is assumed that at least three of the company’s own projects will be released in 2021. The release of a couple more titles is scheduled for 2022.
The Kongregate game portal was launched in 2006. The platform specializes mainly in mobile and browser projects. Now the site hosts over 100 thousand web games, most of which were made on Flash – outdated software from Adobe. Kongregate later transferred the lion’s share of these games to Unity, but nevertheless Adobe’s decision hit the portal hard. In the middle of last year, the owners of Kongregate temporarily banned developers from releasing new titles on the site and reduced some of their employees.
Now, in addition to self-development of games, Kongregate is also going to actively conclude M& A deals. The company has bought game studios before, but the last time it happened was in 2019. Then Ultrabit, known for the RPG BitHeroes, came under the leadership of Kongregate.