[news] kongregate gets $3M from amazon founder

[BlinkOk]

Jeff Bezos invests in Kongregate

[Ray Beez]

I'm speechless.

[tonypa]

lol

Kongregate lets anyone create their own Flash video games...

[BlinkOk]

Kongregate is tying up a significant amount of their capital in some premium games, investing around $100,000 in each title.

none of those would be yours tony. would they?

[tonypa]

No, I havent even uploaded my recent games there since the community is not for my taste.

[Squize]

Kong has really managed to hype itself, even to investors, way above what it actually is.

I wonder if the monthly winners who get $1500 realise they've got $6million in the bank ( And I know that's a bit churlish of me ) ?

Let's hope this isn't a return to the bad old days of one or two huge portals making all the money and thereby controlling the market.

Squize.

[happinessSam]

I have to grudgingly give them respect that they have excellent PR, and considering that they place no restriction on your game to enter the monthly contest $1500's not bad. It's just that it's dependant on the voting and their community make newgrounds' seem clever, balanced and polite.

[ImprisonedPride]

Blah blah nobody cares about money anymore, everyone makes games for love of the art, right?

What the hell does churlish mean?

[WesIsGood]

I make games for love of the black arts

[Gamebrew]

I have to grudgingly give them respect that they have excellent PR, and considering that they place no restriction on your game to enter the monthly contest $1500's not bad. It's just that it's dependant on the voting and their community make newgrounds' seem clever, balanced and polite.

I won 2nd place for my Tactics 100 game :P Actually the monthly prize rule is: "To be eligible for our monthly prizes, games must also implement our statistics API." Plus they don't allow and disable Mochiads.

[Sietjp]

Kongregate is good at marketing but I don't like this community neither.

Investors are blind, they don't know anything about online games. i saw an article on techcrunch where the guy was calling kongregate the leading game website on the net! Kongregate is just doing exactly what other websites where doing since a long time, and in terms of traffic they are far far behind websites like miniclip, minijuegos, addictinggames, and so on, the list is huge.

Of course with all the money they have now, the traffic will increase but I'm not sure the investors will get back their money...

[hatu]

That's great news. More financial interest in Flash games means more money and more full time developers

They're not that big yet though so I guess these guys trust they'll keep growing fast.
ComScore shows 1.7 million global unique visitors in March

That's like 5% of MiniClips visitors

[lesli_felix]

Interesting stats.

I firmly beleive that the hype is as a result of it being sold as a youtube for games, which if the investors believe it, is a bit of a mistake.

At the moment its too easy for other developers to spam games with negative comments designed to boost their own ranking (which is blatantly what's happening) Until they sort that, I don't think I'd be interested.

[Ray Beez]

Anyone want to invest only one third of that into a 7 year old portal?? Anyone?? ;-)

[Al Capwn]

They don't know what they're buying...

Its nice to see that they'll put in microtransaction stuff.

And I think that the 1/2 billion figure that he cites includes all of their sponsored games views.