Recent posts by emily_greer on Kongregate

Topic: Kongregate / So, gamestop's in for a while now...

Hi guys, we’re actually talking to some of the international areas for Gamestop to see how we might fit into their loyalty programs, which for the most part don’t work the same as PowerUpRewards where you earn points. Instead they have levels, and we’re hoping to perhaps do something like give out Kong+ to people who hit a certain level in those programs. But since it works so differently it’s a fairly big effort on both sides to make it work and I’m not sure yet when we’re going to be able to make it happen. We haven’t forgotten though!

Topic: Kongregate / New Kongregate Version: New Search Results Page

Originally posted by Storaged:

Well, I’m not longer able to search for particular users or posts made by particular users via the Kongregate search system.

We’re going to be adding a separate forum search, and I think we’re also planning to add developers to the main search. It’s pretty rare for people to search for regular users.

Topic: Kongregate / New Kongregate Version: New gamepage for everyone

The progress bar is currently being tested on brand new accounts who are the most at sea. We may expand later if the test is successful with the most impressionable group.

Topic: Backyard Monsters / === BYM Compensation Packages on Kongregate ===

Originally posted by Lordleelee2:

Hold on… if she eats a hat… Wouldn’t that mean all TF2 players will freak out?

She herself plays TF2. Maybe she meant a hat there?

Topic: Game Programming / GiTD [#28] Voting - Winners Announced!

Good luck, guys, and congratulations for finishing! That alone is a tremendous accomplishment. And also remember to thank UnknownGuardian for all his work organizing. That’s way harder than us putting up prizes. :-)

Topic: Game Design / How should a "free" to play MMO be funded?

Thanks for posting Matt. In response to some other questions in the thread:

@Draco18s I think just about everything should be earnable with enough time & skill, and an item purchased should never be instant-win, which wrecks game balance. As mentioned community is crucial to games and the presence/retention of non-payers is therefore equally important. A healthy game has a good mix, and does a good job balancing so that the time-rich/money poor and time-poor/money rich can both have fun playing together. And remember that the payer is important to the whole ecosystem, because they are subsidizing the existence of the game for the rest of the players.

On energy systems in general: yes, people hate them, and for most games it is not the primary source of revenue. But I think they play an important role in games even when they are not the vehicle of monetization as they form a constraint that makes play interesting. They also create a dynamic where players can’t binge on content and get sick of it — they leave wanting a bit more. And finally it incents players to return because otherwise they are wasting available energy, and getting players to return is crucial. Of course there’s a balance, and I think games often make their energy systems to tight, especially games that were designed originally for Facebook. One of our most frequent recommendations to games coming on to Kongregate is that they should loosen their energy system a bit, but never that they should get rid of it.

Topic: Kongregate / Using a prepaid card to buy Kreds?

It should work now, we’ve changed options. Please email kreds [at] kongregate.com for help.

Topic: Kongregate / Good news, everyone! jmtb02 is joining Kongregate

Originally posted by BobTheCoolGuy:

Pretty good news! The single player games have undoubted been a little lackluster and it would be nice to see some new ones. However, isn’t hiring one guy to make games a little bit like putting an ice cube in a volcano to cool it down? Or will he be working with other people also, and just be the only official staff member?

Yup, it’s only a small start as he’ll likely make a game every few months. Even if/when we scale up internal game development it’s always going to be a small (but extra cool) portion of the new games on the site each month. We’re thinking of other things to spur development/bring in additional games that range from potentially commissioning sequels to popular games to reaching out to devs making games for other platforms such as mobile. No one thing will be enough but hopefully several efforts will add up to something more substantial.

Topic: Kongregate / Good news, everyone! jmtb02 is joining Kongregate

Haha

Originally posted by T6salt:

Just host a hexagon compitition. Winner gets stuffs.

lol, I would cry

Topic: Kongregate / Good news, everyone! jmtb02 is joining Kongregate

Originally posted by T6salt:

which is part of the reason why mmo-type games have seemed more prominent. We think those games are great…

I’m dissapointed.

Also Phoenix’s link isn’t working because you got his account name wrong.

Fixed the link, thanks. And yes, we do like MMOs & CCGs. Much of the office is currently addicted to Wartune, which is a really good game. But I also love a good elephant or tower defense game.

Topic: Kongregate / Good news, everyone! jmtb02 is joining Kongregate

Hiring John is our first experiment in dedicated internal game development since Kongai. All our other developers are working on website functionality, though schonstal makes games in his free time, and Anthony and Greg have collaborated with others to make games.

You may have noticed that the supply of great single-player games has been a little weaker in the last six months or so, which is part of the reason why mmo-type games have seemed more prominent. We think those games are great but single-player games of all genres are equally important in keeping variety and interest for everyone and the overall Kongregate ecosystem healthy. We’ve been brainstorming ways to increase the supply and we’re hoping developing some games ourselves will be at least a small help.

We’ve always thought John is one of the best game developers out there and overall a great guy, and made a job offer to him as far back as 2006. We’re thrilled that he was willing to make a move right at a time when we were thinking of getting more involved in game development. I’m not promising more hires are on the way, as we’re going to move forward cautiously as we learn what we’re doing, but we couldn’t start with anyone better.

Topic: Kongregate / Revenue hasn't gone to paypal but is confirmed as sent on my revenue page

Does it say “pending” in the payments section next to the payment? That means that we’ve sent instructions to Gamestop to pay it but can’t yet confirm whether it’s gone out (there’s usually a delay.) Since the 1st is falling on a Saturday none of this month’s payments are likely to have been sent yet, they will go out sometime during the workweek. If you have any follow-up questions I recommend sending an email to support.

Topic: Kongregate / i won the $10,000 gamestop giftcard for the mad god contest

Originally posted by emily_greer:

I can confirm that poisonthewell is in fact the $10k winner via a random drawing process. He didn’t even have to give us a credit card, just filled out some forms for the company that runs Gamestop’s contests. :-)

One clarification! The paperwork still needs to be approved by the company running the contest so I should more accurately say he’s been selected to win, rather than that he has already won. It should be fine, though.

Topic: Kongregate / i won the $10,000 gamestop giftcard for the mad god contest

I can confirm that poisonthewell is in fact the $10k winner via a random drawing process. He didn’t even have to give us a credit card, just filled out some forms for the company that runs Gamestop’s contests. :-)

Topic: Game Programming / End of Kongregate Tip System

It’s correct that most people seem to tip 1 to 10 kreds, and so very few devs were reaching the minimum payout, and the ones that were make far, far more in advertising and/or item sales. At one point we changed the amounts we showed in the tip jar hoping people would increase their tip sizes if that was the default but it didn’t make much difference; only about 0.1% (yes, that’s 1/10th of 1%) of kreds bought each month are tipped.

Since most developers choose to be paid via Paypal, and Paypal is our #2 payment method after credit cards it definitely started to feel like we were getting in the way. Given that and the substantial hassle/complexity of fraud issues trickyrodent mentioned we made the decision to end it and concentrate on growing the other sources of revenue for developers. And here’s hoping tipping works better directly!

Topic: Kongregate / Activity feeds for everyone

I studied Russian & Eastern European studies in college (if anyone wants facts about medieval and early modern Transylvania I gots them) but then ended up working for catalogs doing very stats-heavy marketing and data mining. I went back to school and did the equivalent of an econ major/math minor at U.C. Berkeley (no degree since I already had one) and then built statistical models for a living for several years before starting Kongregate. So yup, we know what we’re doing. That doesn’t mean we don’t make mistakes — we do! all the time! — but we’re pretty sophisticated/knowledgeable about stats.

Topic: Kongregate / The State of Kongregate.

We look at a lot of things, and they vary by the test. The number one thing we look at with any test is whether people are returning the next day and the next week as those are the most unambiguously “good” stats. Game plays going up for example could be good because we’re getting people to explore and play more, or bad because we’re recommending worse games, and people need to try more games to find one they like. So we look at games played, achievements earned, etc, for information but don’t make decisions based on those.

When we’re testing something that should have a significant effect on a particular type of behavior such as social behavior, or kreds buying, then we look carefully at that. In those cases if the effect on return rates are more neutral but the affect on the immediate behavior we wanted to influence is strong we’ll consider the test a success.

Your comment on friends is valid — players have more friends, but are they better quality? That’s still playing out. But so far return rates are also up, though by a smaller amount, so we think the overall experience is probably better for the average user.

Topic: Kongregate / The State of Kongregate.

Hey guys, to weigh in on some of the very valid points people have made about the stats I quoted:

Yes, 10% alt accounts would be enough to distort things if a) they were all active at the same time and b) the numbers are close. But most alt accounts are created then abandoned so the % of active accounts that are alts is much, much lower than 10%, and the gross changes I was talking about were quite large, so I’m not concerned they are affecting things. In any case when we look at split tests we throw out alt accounts so they’re not a factor in those at all.

For those asking about seasonality that’s an EXCELLENT question and something we look at quite a bit. We consistently see seasonal spikes in chat during vacation periods such as summer and spring & winter break, and in other social activity to a lesser extent. The changes we’ve seen March to June this year far exceed that. For comparison from March to June 2011 the numbers were: friends added +50%, shouts left -40% (I think there must have been some shout spam issues in March 2011), highly active registered users +10%, % highly active +3%, chat messages +20%. So chat is up a similar amount but everything else is up more than double the previous seasonal change. The % of users adding friends is also an all-time record.

Topic: Kongregate / The State of Kongregate.

Alt accounts are probably included, but from what we’ve looked at in the past they represent less than 10% of accounts created, so they’re not skewing things too much. Very heavy users do tend to have multiple alt accounts, but that’s just a small % of the userbase.

To give a sample of some of the results of the changes here are some stats we just pulled for June vs March:

• friends added: +130%
• shouts left: +124%
• highly active registered users: +47%
• % highly active: +19%
• of chat messages: +23%

As Alison said we truly put a tremendous amount of thought into these changes, and are constantly working to improve them. If it makes you guys feel better we don’t plan any more huge changes for a while, just refinements of the current system. But I can’t promise we won’t make big changes in the future, because we probably will. But we will be trying very hard to make Kongregate better, if different.

Topic: Kongregate / Kongregate's "privacy" of its users

Hi kmg90, the answer is not that we’re being sneaky, but that some of our ads are provided by ad networks and the ads have trackers we have no control over. I’m afraid that if you profile any site that is running ads you will see similar results.

On the list that you showed the only one that are setting ourselves is the one called “newrelic” which is a very cool service we use to track the speed of our page loads to help us optimize. It’s not tracking any behavior off Kongregate, or anything identifiable beyond your OS, browser, & connection speed—it’s mostly focusing on things like rendering speed. You can read more on newrelic here: http://newrelic.com/.

Most of the rest I recognize as ad networks that are running through Google’s Adsense, plus a couple like CPM Star that we work with directly. The fact that we’re not setting them intentionally doesn’t really make things any better, but there’s also not much we can really do. We need to run advertising to pay the developers of the games as well as to cover our server & staff costs — kreds revenue mostly goes just to the games that use kreds — and all ad networks need to run tracking in order to optimize their ad serving. It’s not a satisfying answer, but it’s an honest one.

Topic: Kongregate / New Kongregate Version: Bug fixes and hopefully a little less spam

Originally posted by BobTheCoolGuy:

Originally posted by Moshdef:

Awesome, that’s really good to know! You also bring up one of the reasons it’s so hard for users like me to understand what’s going on, because I really have no idea how hard it is to customize the feed, the profile, or the homepage. I imagine it’s much harder than we give the programmers credit for.

I’ve actually worked in rails before, so it just depends how it is implemented :D At the risk of making a fool of myself, I imagine you’d have a table of FeedItems in your database. Each of these feed items would of course be linked to a user. They’d also be linked to some piece of ‘content’ in the database, say a shout, an earned badge, a comment, etc. When you go to your feed, the server would look up your feed items, then look up the content they refer to, and finally render that content if the content is something you chose to display. Hiding them would be as easy as removing that FeedItem in the database that contains your user id and a link to a piece of content. the content would still be there, it just wouldn’t show up. Or, each feed item could simply have a ‘display’ field, which would indicate whether or not to show it in your feed.

I have no idea if this is how it is done. I’d be more than pleased if someone corrected me.

Yup, that’s how it would normally work but we’re using a different database system for feeds called Redis — it keeps feed items in memory so we don’t have to hit the database for every individual item. I’m a lot less familiar with it which is why I’m cautious — we might be storing shouts as a single item so if you hide it on either profile it automatically hides on the other.

Topic: Kongregate / New Kongregate Version: Bug fixes and hopefully a little less spam

Okay, I get it a bit more now. Will discuss being able to hide individual shouts on your own profile internally since I don’t know all the potential engineering issues with feeds.

Topic: Kongregate / New Kongregate Version: Bug fixes and hopefully a little less spam

Originally posted by Moshdef:

In the interest of making things more social, I think you should really be able to disable that feature. That will stop me from ever posting a shout on somebody else’s profile, just because I don’t want it to also show up on mine. Although I understand that it’s meant to be a public message, this seems counterproductive to the initiatives you are currently promoting in the community and actually discourages me from communicating. Sending a PM is always an option, like you said, but then again it always was.

And the developer responses thing is definitely a bug. They still show up on my profile, and manually deleting them does nothing since they just reappear after refreshing the page.

I’m also just a bit confused by one part of this update. Does this mean that messages from games now appear on our profile, rather than in our PMs? I’m not 100% sure what a “following feed post” is. Is that just a post to our activity feed?

I guess I don’t understand why you don’t want it on your profile. You said it, it’s not private, anybody who goes to that profile will see it anyway. And why would sending a PM instead of a shout not be an acceptable alternative?

Topic: Kongregate / New Kongregate Version: Bug fixes and hopefully a little less spam

Originally posted by Moshdef:

Developer responses still can’t be filtered out, and I still can’t manually delete them.

Shouts that I leave on other profiles still appear on mine, and I can’t delete them from my profile without deleting the original shout.

Are these intentional features, or are these bugs that will eventually be fixed?

The shouts is deliberate — that’s a form of communication that’s meant to be public, if you don’t want other people seeing it you can send a PM. I would think developer responses would not be posted if commenting is blocked from posting, if not that’s a bug.

Topic: Kongregate / Completeing a W8-BEN

Originally posted by zAlbee:

As a non-US resident, you’re not eligible for an SSN, but you can apply for the ITIN, using the W-7 form as you said. It’s a pain, but not hard. Just time-consuming.

I was always confused as to why entering an SSN is an option, since the whole W-8 form is used for foreign persons.

I believe it’s possible through complicated circumstances for foreign persons to get a Social Security number, but it’s unusual.

Unknown Guardian is correct: if you fill out your payment information form that is a legal W-8BEN (or a W-9 if you are a U.S. person).

If you have specific questions on the W-8BEN or the process of getting a U.S. tax id we are happy to help as much as we can, just email us at accounting@kongregate.com. We know that this is a bit of a hassle for individuals (for businesses it’s pretty easy) but it can come in useful in situations other than Kongregate. I believe that Apple requires a U.S. tax id from all developers to even submit a game to the app store, and that Valve also requires it.