[jim-greer]

Whoops, I'm not there anymore. Emily is still CEO. The focus has shifted from being a web games platform to a mobile games publisher. I'm much more of a platform person so it made sense to transition it. She's doing a great job - they've published a lot of great games and are helping indies succeed in the age of of "games as a service."

Before I was at EA, I started a game studio in the CD-ROM era. We published an RTS-puzzle hybrid game through Activision, which was a critical success but a commercial failure. Because of the distribution and funding model then, Activision owned the copyright. That meant that we couldn't make a sequel to correct the things we'd screwed up the first time around.

When we started Kongregate in 2006, internet distribution was there, but it was very hard to make money. There were no smartphones and Steam only distributed Valve games.

The goal of Kongregate was to fix that. We contributed to the change, though smartphones, Steam, and digital distribution on consoles were the big drivers of course.

[forkLding]

Is there a blog post on Kongregate's founding? Kongregate was my childhood and I've often wondered about the history. Much thanks for this post too.

[jim-greer]

Unfortunately no.

Edit: Emily gave a talk on it at the IGDA Summit, but unfortunately it's only available to members.

[ryandrake]

NetStorm was awesome, and in many ways ahead of its time! You might know that there was actually a failed attempt by fans to pick up with the source and continue to improve/support it. Alas life happened and the effort petered out and was abandoned, but we briefly tried. Wish you guys could have been given the time and money to do a proper reboot!

Edit: Doing a quick nostalgic search, it looks like there ended up being at least one other effort to reboot it that went somewhere. Nice!