When people started having Internet access at work, free online games became a much sought-after commodity. Thus, hundreds of sites offering online games sprouted from everywhere, and the free online gaming space became quite crowded. Lately, two services have appeared - Cafe.com and Kongregate - both claiming to focus on “social gaming”.
This strikes me as a bit odd. I understand the need to give a social/networking element to many aspects of the web, but gaming? Social gaming already exists, and it’s called multiplayer. And last time I checked Blizzard’s earnings, the concept was doing quite well.
So, what do these new services offer that earns them the right to be “social”? Cafe.com is offering free casual games (casual meaning closer to Tetris than to Half Life), together with the possibility to chat and use customizable 3D avatars. On Cafe, the games are free, and their business model consists not of monetization through selling game items, new levels and similar upgrades, and advertising. The players can purchase the virtual money - gold coins - and use it to buy power-ups and upgrades.
Now, don’t get me wrong, this is all perfectly fine, but pitching it from the “social” point of view it seems a bit over the top, because, once again, none of this is really new - free multiplayer games with chat and avatars and top lists exist for a long time.
Kongregate takes the “social” concept a step further, enabling anyone to submit games they created to be licensed. Their business model is based on ad revenue sharing (Kongregate shares between 25% and 50% of ad revenue with developers). So, if you’re a Flash developer with a knack for creating online games, this might be a good place to try your skills out.
As far as actual games go, Cafe.com currently has four (plus two upcoming), while Kongregate’s site is currently having problems, but according to VentureBeat the number is over 300. I’ve tried some of them, and they’re fun, but not revolutionary: platform arcades, shooters, and logical/puzzles. Anyone who kills time playing online games will be at home turf here, but I doubt anyone will be amazed.
So, despite the “social” moniker, from the standpoint of someone just wanting to play games online, neither Cafe nor Kongregate offer much novelty. Both these services will face fierce competition in the form of Miniclip, Shockwave, and hundreds of others online gaming sites who aren’t pushing the Web 2.0 aspect of being “social”, but they have lots of games and lots of visitors. Kongregate can at least hope for young developers swarming to make a buck of their games, while I’m afraid that Cafe might simply drown in the sea of sites offering exactly the same as them - free online games.
Hi there -
Sorry that Kongregate wasn’t responsive this morning - we’ve beefed up the db and are back in action. If you spend some time on the site I think you’ll see that we’re doing something quite different than Miniclip or Shockwave - not that there isn’t stiff competition in the web games sector.
@Jim: it’s a problem I often face: the site itself is unresponsive, but the news is out, and then I have to base much of what I write on second hand information. I decided to put both Kongregate and Cafe into the mix, but I did take care to point out the main features of one and the other.
I know that Kongregate’s concept is different from, for example, Miniclip, but from the perspective of an average guy/girl at work, just looking for some free online games to play, there’s not much of a difference. And this is why I’m quite reserved about the success of ’social gaming’. I hope you prove me wrong, and I wish you the best of luck.
Thanks, Stan - I hope we do, too. To that point, did you see this post from Jeremy Liew at Lightspeed on designing for “time rich” and “time poor”, people?
http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/time-rich-or-time-poor/
For people who have a lot of time, our audience, I think the social features make sense. These games are filling the same hours that IMing does & that social networking sites do.
What is new at cafe.com is much more than social. For the first time you have a combination of:
- multiplayer capabilities
- community features (and you will see much more of those in futures releases)
- retail quality casual games
- free to play≈
- Identity with avatar system
- Micro transactions to buy powerups
all this for *casual gamers*.
Until now you had many sites with flash and java games with some kind of community features but none of them are offering free “download quality” games the way cafe.com does.
To my knowledge, only folks at QQ (China) and others in Korea (NHN for example) have combined all those features together. Remember that QQ Games is simply the largest online game platform on earth, with PCU above 3 millions !!
In comparison WoW is nearing 900k, Kart Ridder is about 600k, Yahoo! games in the US is about 100k, Second life is a mere 50k, Habbo is about 40k.
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