Video game publisher and web game company Kongregate is no longer accepting new submissions for its game portal Kongregate.com, the company announced. As of this writing, the Kongregate site says there are 128,655 games available on the service, and the announcement means that more is unlikely. Kongregate says it is also shutting down many of the site’s social features, and GameIndustry.biz He reports that he has made several layoffs as part of the changes.
“You will still be able to play in our existing library of over 128,000 awesome games and developers will be able to update their games as normal,” Kongregate said in its statement.
It is unlikely to be so surprising that the company is taking resources away from its site, which it described as a “legacy Flash gaming platform” in a statement to GameIndustry.biz. In 2017, Adobe announced that support for Flash would end this year, and several browsers now block the standard by default. For now, you can still manually enable Flash to play many of the games on Kongregate.com, but it’s a legacy technology.
The end of Flash has raised questions about how the thousands of games that depend on it will be preserved. For its part, Kongregate has partnered with The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester to preserve its Flash games. The collaboration will cause the museum to download and preserve the games so that they remain available for education and research, and will take steps to ensure that the games continue to be playable.
Although Kongregate says its existing game library will still be available, many of the site’s social features will be disabled on July 22. Around 20 of the game-specific chat rooms will remain open. But most will close, along with chat rooms that aren’t associated with any specific game. Certain non-gaming forums will disappear from the site, while “most” others will become read-only, allowing only administrators to post. Forums for Kongregate’s own games like Bit Heroes won’t be affected, the company said, and will devote fewer resources to supporting the site overall.
In addition to having to reflect broader changes in the gaming industry, Kongregate said GameIndustry.biz that the COVID-19 pandemic has also had a negative impact on your business. “That is why we had to take this unfortunate step to reshape our organization,” he said.
Kongregate also confirmed that it is making several layoffs as part of the changes. The company confirmed the layoffs to GameIndustry.biz, without revealing an exact number. “We can confirm that we have made the difficult but necessary decision to release several esteemed team members today,” the company said in a statement.
Kongregate said his business is currently “heavily focused” on game development.
