It’s been a very long time coming, however Adobe Flash’s drawn-out loss of life spiral is coming to a detailed. This week, free browser game portal Kongregate introduced that it’ll not be accepting new submissions to the positioning, shedding a number of employees members because it pivots solely in the direction of growing and publishing games. While the whole lot at present hosted on the positioning will stay there for the foreseeable, they’re the final games Kongregate will ever host.
End of an period, that.
For some time now, Kongregate has been shifting away from internet game internet hosting in favour of publishing, going so fas as to launch launching their own Kartridge storefront again in 2017. This week, the Kongregate announced that their days of internet hosting free browser games have come to an finish. Effective instantly, the positioning will not be accepting new game submissions.
“As most of you know, Kongregate.com was first created in 2006,” Kongregate wrote in a forum announcement this week. “During the intervening years, Kongregate as a company has grown and adjusted with those industry-wide changes. Today our business is largely focused on developing games and flash, as you are aware, is slowly going away. That means that Kongregate.com will need to evolve as well.”
From July 22nd, Kongregate can even begin rolling again social options. Chat rooms not tied to particular games – and all however 20 of these which can be – will likely be closed down. “Non-gaming” boards are being wiped from the web site, whereas most others are being moved to a “read-only” state, to be solely up to date for bulletins by admins. The web site itself is mostly taking a step again, and can obtain much less assist as Kongregate pivot in the direction of growing and publishing new games.
Games already hosted on Kongregate will stay playable in the interim. But Flash, as they rightly level out, is on its final legs. Adobe plan to finish assist for his or her Flash Player Plugin by the end of this year, and browsers like Google Chrome have lengthy been phasing out assist for the deprecated software program.
Sadly, Kongregate’s restructuring has additionally led to a spherical of layoffs. GamesIndustry.biz reports (by the use of an announcement to Forbes) that the restructuring led to them taking the “difficult, but necessary decision to let a number of appreciated team members go” – although a number of former workers claimed to have been given no warning earlier than being made redundant.
“Over the last few years, we have been transitioning our focus to better align with our strengths and the gaming industry as a whole. This year has been especially difficult for us, and the rest of the world, with COVID 19 affecting our business in a negative way and changing the overall games market. That’s why we had to take this unfortunate step to reshape our organization.”
Kongregate would possibly by no means have been my flash web site of alternative (our college was staunchly a Miniclip lot), however by their very own reckoning, the portal at present hosts over 128,000 free games. Standalone launchers like Flashpoint provide to save lots of at the very least a few of these from extinction – and so long as their .swf information stay on-line, many will nonetheless be playable by way of bespoke flash gamers.
But Kongregate most likely gained’t be the final to name time on internet hosting free browser games. For now, it’s yet one more nail within the coffin of a scene that’s solely changing into extra inaccessible with time.
