Inside Social Games

With over 4,500 games from over 1,700 developers, Kongregate has been helping Flash game developers and players meet for over two year – and it’s about to extend its reach into Facebook. Starting this week, Kongregate will launch the first of several Kongregate games ported to the Facebook Platform (Dolphin Olympics, not yet live, will be one of the first to launch).

Inside Social Games sat down with Kongregate CEO Jim Greer yesterday to learn more about Kongregate’s plans for bringing its games to Facebook and other social networks.

Jim, what are Kongregate’s plans for bringing your game library to Facebook?

Unlike other social network game developers like SGN and Zynga, we are more focused on Kongregate as a destination site. However, we’ve created a templated system whereby we can take Kongregate games and make them into Facebook applications. Usually, this means adding a simple viral mechanic of being able to challenge friends.

We’re starting with selected simple single player games to “Jetmanify,” but may move into longer playing games later. We’re putting the Kongregate brand on our Facebook games, so we will only pick the best ones.

Which kinds of games do you think will work well in social networks?

Games with the most general appeal will always work well there, because people don’t want to learn new games to play with their friends. We don’t want to get in there and scrap with Zynga on Texas Hold Em or Scrabble.

Once you get beyond those kinds of standard games, a lot of players prefer to play them in a place like Kongregate where more hard-core web gamers are. We have a robust gamer community on Kongregate.

How do Kongregate’s stats compare to those of game developers on social networks?

Kongregate currently has about 3.2 million monthly uniques, and the average player plays 42 games per month. In Facebook terms, we have about 250,000 daily active users.

So what is Kongregate’s model for sharing revenue with developers? How will being on social networks affect developers’ ability to make money?

Most of the games that developers upload to our site are simple Flash games that are already done, and we make available a simple API for leaderboards and achievements, and build community around their games. From there, we offer developers a 25% to 50% revenue share on ad revenue generated by their games.

However, we’re working on two intiatives to increase and expand our monetization. First, we’re building up a direct sales team that will allow us to generate higher ad revenue. Second, we’re launching a microtransaction wallet system that developers can use to enable transactions within their games.

Thanks Jim. Finally, is Kongregate developing games or acquiring game developers right now?

We are funding the development of some games to make sure our wallet system has a high quality launch. However, we’re not looking to acquire developers. Kongregate is more of a place for indie games.