Gaming portals – websites which offer a variety of games, usally flash games, that people can play in their browser – have been around for a long time. When I was back in high school, people used to wonder why we never got any work done in computer class. The reason was that every time the teacher went to the other side of the room we would furtively open up some flash portal website and sneak in a few rounds of “the Helicopter Game“, before being noticed and told to get back to learning Powerpoint. Little did we know at the time, but the simple free online games we enjoyed would turn from timewasters for bored schoolboys into a multi-billion dollar market.
Social and casual gaming has boomed in recent years. With companies like Zynga boasting user numbers in the tens of millions, revenue in the hundreds of millions and estimated valuations in the tens of billions, the gaming industry has come to realise that casual gaming is not merely the younger, less attractive sibling of hardcore gaming, but actually a desirable market in its own right. More and more developers are building social and casual games in the hope of capturing a piece of this market.
Where do gaming portals fit into the social gaming boom? Along with social networks, gaming portals are one of the major distribution channels for free online games. In addition, many casual game developers have opened their own portals, to give themselves an extra channel to market and distribute their games. As a result, both established companies and new startups are entering the portal space, making an already crowded market even more competitive.
Let’s take a look at some of the players in this industry, both big and small.
One thing you’ll notice after a casual survey of the portal market is that many portal sites are very similar. However, today we’ll be looking at a few websites that haven’t been afraid to innovate and do things a little differently. Two sites in particular stand out, and both have many devoted fans – fans who like to argue on the forums about which of the two is the best. These two sites are ArmorGames and Kongregate. Though both innovators, they’ve innovated in very different directions.
ArmorGames is all about the community. Like many portal websites, players can earn points and level up. However, unlike other sites, players do not earn points for playing games – only for rating or commenting on them, or posting in the forum. It sounds strange, but it works, and fans of ArmorGames say they like the site because they can always find great discussions about their favourite games, and suggestions for new games to try out.
“ArmorGames is quite a good website well actually its my favourite no doubt about that! It has a great community, excellent mods and users awesome games for people to write good long comments. And alot of fun.” (ArmorGames forum user)
I think ArmorGames has realised that building a strong community is not just about adding the right features – a bigger problem is motivating users to participate in the community. Lots of sites tack on social or community features without considering this aspect, and I think they could learn a thing or two from ArmorGames’ approach.
Another interesting feature of ArmorGames are “armatars” – users can’t upload their own pictures, but instead use pre-existing avatars that they earn after achieving enough points to level up. Although it sounds very simple, users really like this feature, and they commonly cite it as one of the killer features of the site. I think it’s the “unlockable content” aspect that makes it so sticky.
Next up is my personal favourite, Kongregate. In contrast to ArmorGames and their focus on community, Kongregate is all about the achievements. Many sites have tried incorporating badges and points that users can earn for completing in-game activities, but I think Kongregate boasts one of the best implementations of this concept. If I find a flash game I like on another website, I’ll usually check to see if the same game is on Kongregate, so I have the chance to earn more cool badges to put on my profile.
I think the reason Kongregate’s achievement system works so well is simply that they realised that designing such a system was difficult, and focused their resources on getting the design right. They needed to provide a good and usable API so game developers could integrate their games with Kongregate, they needed to motivate developers to use the API, and they needed to make sure the achievements were well-thought-out from a game design perspective. Kongregate had to make all three of these areas worked before the achievement system could succeed.
(Greg from Kongregate has more insight about achievement design)
Of course, achievements appeal more to a certain type of person. For me, they offer a clear value-add to my Kongregate experience, but many players think they’re an annoying distraction. Then again, I can’t see the appeal of ArmorGame’s social and community features (I play games just to play games, not socialise). Just goes to show that there’s different types of game players and it’s important when creating software not to assume everyone shares your opinions.
Kongregate Main Page
Aside from ArmorGames and Kongregate, there’s a few other game portals I think have taken an innovative direction. One is
Friv, which although small, has recently seen a large growth in traffic. Friv’s concept is very simple: the site consists of a single page with links to 250 games. The games are hand-selected by the website to represent the best free games on offer at any one time; every time a game is added, another one is removed. That’s it; Friv does not include user accounts, profiles, social network integration, comments, ratings, categories, or any of the other features most other portals feel they need to include.
It’s a minimalist approach designed to keep the focus on the games, and I like the idea. There’s a few things I might change about the implementation, however – for example, I think adding categories would improve the site without hurting the core concept – but then again, Friv needs to be careful to avoid adding features they don’t really need. It’s the ability to say “no” to unnecessary features that seperates the minimalist Googles and Apples from the bloated Yahoos and Microsofts. I hope the approach works for Friv as well.
One final site I must mention in the list of portal innovators is Mochi Media. Though they operate a traditional portal at http://www.mochigames.com, they’re most famous for the services they provide for developers, helping them monetize and distribute their games across multiple sites (Mochi claims they can help you reach over 10,000 portals). They also offer a comprehensive set of APIs that developers can plug their games into, providing functionality such as achievements, high score tables, and microtransactions.
I’ve not seen any other compabies that follow Mochi’s approach, and it’ll be interesting to see how their positioning as a middleman between developers and portals works out for them. As a American subsidiary of publicly traded Chinese company Shanda, Mochi has both lots of cash and access to the world’s two largest economies. I certainly expect to see them make some waves in the casual gaming industry over the next few years.
In this post, we’ve taken a look at a few of the innovators playing in the game portal space. However, the portal market is much bigger than the sites covered today – all of which, despite their popularity, are still only mid-level players. Come back next time for part 2, to find out who the big players are and how they got to the top.
Isaac joined TribePlay a couple of weeks ago and he is currently doing an internship in Back End Development for TribePlay.
We are always looking for young talents or under-graduates that are creative, independent and open-minded! TribePlay is offering internships.
