Kongregate's Premium Games Announced page 2 (locked)

@Wan2Play: Do you know what the average Flash game budget is? $100k is a nice budget for a developer. Let Kongregate concern themselves with making back the money they invest.

You guys totally miss the point, the point is you are getting ripped off, unless you’re game totally flops. Kong will probably use your game for advertising purposes, they will profit off the micro-transactions, advertising, for a WHOLE year! As an exmaple, take the Papa Louies franchise. The pizzeria game, had about 120k hits when their front-page reign ended. Now they don’t even have 140k hits. That’s the amount of drop in play after only a few months. Now imagine in one year, how little that game will bring in. Only a few games ever reach the popularity of Desktop Tower Defense. Even so it has not even been around for a year, and through all this, Kongregate would have made all the money. It just doesn’t make sense to sell out like this.

It’s Kongs choice on what they do so you should let them do what they want to.

Zening looks awsome. PRobably will be my favourite but i want to see some ingame graphics.

Wan2Play — How in the world could this be a rip-off? We pay premium game developers up to 100K. We take the lion’s share of the ad and microtransaction revenue only until our initial investment is recovered, then the developer gets the lion’s share. Any expenses you incur should be factored into the amount we pay you for the game. You own the IP still, too.

I trust developers to tell me how much the game will take and how long it will take to do them. If they can’t survive on that amount, then they need to readjust their figures. We’re hoping that with the various money-making opportunities these premium game developers have they will actually be able to make a fair amount of money even after the launch. After that, they’ll need to move on to something else or work on expansions, just like any other game company. Could a game company of ten people living in downtown San Francisco afford to live and work off of 100K for a year? No, of course not. But smaller groups working for shorter amounts of time very well could.

I don’t know what crazy-awesome job you have Wan2Play, but for me and the other Intuition guys, this is pretty much a dream job. We’re getting to do what we love, what a ton of awesome developers do for very little or no money, make whatever kind of game we want to make, and we have quit our day jobs.

Lets break it down for a sec:

If a developer gets the middle of the range, about $60,000 for about 10 months of development with two people, that comes out to $3000 a month. Extrapolate that out to a year 12 * 3000 → makes it about equivalent to a salary job with $36,000 compensation. When you consider the fact that you are doing something you love with no-one telling you what to do, you get to keep all the intellectual property (which means any action figures based on your game only profit you, not kong), and the developers actually keep 70%(!) of the royalties… you will never find a better partner for making flash games, imho.

Wan2Play seems to be under the impression that Kongregate will continue taking the majority of the microtransaction revenue even after the initial investment has been earned out, which is not the case, as Chris pointed out.

Unless there’s something I don’t know about, this is the only existing opportunity that developers have to develop a game in Flash with this kind of budget without sacrificing their intellectual property.

You guys totally miss the point, the point is you are getting ripped off, unless you’re game totally flops.

Do you work in the game industry? You must have missed the point that $100k is a good budget for a Flash game. I’ve made my living in this industry for a long time and have worked on projects with development costs of several thousands to several hundreds of thousands, I know whats a ripoff and whats not. Many companies dont even want to give you a few hundred or few thousand dollars for a game. Others are willing to give you $10-30k some of the time, but then they want to own all the IP. Being paid to do the work and keeping the IP + residuals (from what I understand is the case) is actually a good deal in this industry.

Chris sums it up well:

I trust developers to tell me how much the game will take and how long it will take to do them. If they can’t survive on that amount, then they need to readjust their figures.

Could a game company of ten people living in downtown San Francisco afford to live and work off of 100K for a year? No, of course not. But smaller groups working for shorter amounts of time very well could.

Wan2Play,
I didn’t quit my day job. The fact is nobody knows how any of this is going to turn out. One thing is for sure though; this has been a huge opportunity for me to make a kick-ass game. There is no way I could have done half of the stuff I’m going to do without Kongregate’s sponsorship. I’m really excited about pushing the limits.

TehLegend,
I think zening will be my favorite too. However, Dinowaurs does look pretty sweet!

Ya Dinowaurs art style looks nice. Reminds me of my favourite pen tool. I use it for everything

Oh man. So excited. So, in one of the articles it says early 2008 as the release dates… is that actually early 2008 or are you using the Kongai timeframes?

Heh. Should be actual.

It sounded like Kong keeps all the money from one year. And actually 36k is barely enough to live. And people coming out of university who are programmers, can make upwards of 75k a year off the bat. Still 100k is not enough money for anything decent.

Wow. I can’t wait!

I really like the storyline of the first one… Poor dinos xP

Wan2Play… If this is too personal, please, don’t feel forced to respond. I am just curious, what exactly is your day job?

Hey everyone! Thanks again Chris for all the great press on the premium games, the separate blurbs and pics for each were great — and now I’m really excited to see all of them come to life!

Wan2Play, I think your facts are a little off: The premium games are getting their development funded, we don’t need to wait to see how well it does before we get paid.. so we’re only getting “ripped off” if we’ve been terribly awful at our own budgeting :) They’re not keeping the money for a year, we’re getting paid as we go. And Kongregate is being more than generous with micro-transaction share both during and after recoup, a lot more fair than what you’d be getting with a typical game publisher. OK, back to the actual topic!

It really is amazing to be working on a large-scale project with Kongregate — we’ve been excited about Kong since before the closed beta launched, and it’s awesome to be working on an exclusive title that we can tie in with all of the community aspects we’ve loved from the get-go. And hey, do we get first dibs on beta-testing the other premium games? :)

@Capital555, I am a programmer, at a tech company in Canada.

All of the games look very, very fun. I can’t wait. :D

And actually 36k is barely enough to live.

Ramen and canned tuna, my friend. Ramen and canned tuna.

And hey, do we get first dibs on beta-testing the other premium games? :)

No. You’re too busy. ;)

Wan2Play, that may be true with programmers getting high salaries after college — but those salaries wouldn’t necessarily be the case for programmers creating their own indie game development startup :)

Darn! Ah, well, that’s true Chris :)

A smart person with no family to support can live for under 15k a year, which means with taxes you might need to make 25k a year. To develop games for 100k and get a generous amount of cash, unless kongregate is strict and doesn’t let you use your budget for food if you need it (which I doubt) would actually be good. And true, a professionally credited developer can make some good cash, but have you ever considered that people may not like the feeling of working for a corporation getting yelled at as you work on making sure a characters arm moves right for the first 3 years of your career?

Regardless of how much people could make doing other jobs, the amount of money to be made from this premium game program absolutely dwarfs what most flash developers can make on their own. Saying its a ripoff is ludicrous.

geeks out

I absolutely love the concept of them all its quite amazing

I’d have to say things seem a bit more explained but still, it doesn’t make sense that Kong only takes the money enough to recover their costs. Plus, there is still a deadline, and you have to produce, and after you pay all the expenses and stuff you will probably not make much money. I guess though this premium thing is more to get the studios on their feet, and less to make millions. I must say i was a little hasty to belittle the program, and I do regret some of my comments, but I still don’t believe that this program is the best for developers. I’m sorry to Greg, and Chris, who work hard, and I just outright belittled them. Next time I will more closely look at things. Obviously after the explanation, it makes more sense.

Roger and I are also very excited about being part of the Premium Game program!

I can’t wait to finally and cleanly win all of my arguments! It will be wonderful to have tangible proof of being right!!

We will get some pretty artwork for that first page… the logo is a bit sad compared to the wonderful other images.

The opportunity that Kongregate is offering now is simply amazing! I haven’t seen any better deals EVER available to flash game developers. Many people in the industry that I’ve talked with think Kongregate is being overly generous!