Kongregate News

Kongregate is hiring! We're looking for a Lead QA Engineer and Rails Programmer. See our jobs page for details.

We added a couple of new things last night - most obvious is the scrolling goodness on the homepage. Instead of staring at the same featured game all week you can use the scrolly buttons to see lots of them. Look for more interesting things in there soon (he says mysteriously). AND, hell is about to freeze over. That's right, we talked to Satan and he's moving south. Because we have a release candidate for Kongai. We've been busy fixing bugs, improving the AI, and now we're almost ready to launch. Woot. - Jim

GemCraft was the winner of last week's contest on Kongregate for $250. The runners-up were Hedgehog Launch and Bowja the Ninja 2 (In Bigman's Compound) for $150 each.

We added a new games for your site feature on Kongregate. If you're a webmaster who would like to host or embed some of Kongregate's freely distributable sponsored games, check it out!

Arcane was the winner of last week's contest on Kongregate for $250. The runners-up were Typing Ninja Hunter and Gimme5Games presents "Swinging Ball" for $150 each.

Time.com released its list of the 50 best websites of 2008 yesterday, and Kongregate is currently bouncing around the top of the user-rating poll (check out our write-up and weigh in here).

At the time of this posting, Kongregate is currently at #3, beating out a lot of other really great sites, including Free Rice at #5. Apparently when given the choice between playing games for achievements and playing games to feed starving children, the answer is clear!

Mr. Bounce by Pixelate was the winner of last week's contest on Kongregate for $250. The runners-up were TBA 2 by ArmorGames and DayMare Town 2 by MateuszSkutnik for $150 each.

The week before that, Spellblazer by rapaxus was the winner for $250, followed by runners-up Hungry Blocks by cookiemonster55 and Square Team by mikeromero for $150 each.

And here are the monthly contest winners for May!

1st. Monsters' Den: Book of Dread
2nd. Platform Racing 2
3rd. Tactical Assassin 2
4th. Music Catch
5th. 6 Differences
6th. Chronotron
7th. Dungeon Defender
8th. Nano War
9th. Temple Guardian 2

That's $1500 for first, $1000 for second, $700 for third, $500 for fourth, and $250 for all the others. As usual, implementing our stats API is a requirement for winners to claim their prize.

UPDATE: We've resolved the issues with Bubble Tanks, and the original challenge has been restored. Sorry about the problems, everyone!

Due to technical difficulties, the Bubble Tanks segment of this week's challenge has been replaced with a task in rotaZion. We apologize for the site lag throughout the day; hopefully this will help clear things up!

Last week definitely broke some records on Kongregate. Music Catch beat through the stiff competition to claim the $250 weekly prize, while Tactical Assassin 2 and 6 Differences were the two runners-up for $150 each.

Dungeon Defender, Nano War, and The Several Journeys of Reemus are all tremendously worthy honorable mentions.

All six of these games could've easily claimed a top weekly prize on their own merits if they weren't so bunched together. Be sure to check them all out!

Monsters' Den: Book of Dread was the winner last week for $250. Temple Guardian 2 and DarkWarStrategy Chapter 1 were the two runners-up for $150 each.

Two weeks ago, Platform Racing 2 was the winner of the $250 weekly prize. Castle Crashing The Beard and Bowja the Ninja on Factory Island were the two runners-up for $150 each.

Last week, Chronotron was the $250 winner, and Music Bounce and Planet Defender were the two runners-up for $150 each.

And, of course, we have winners from the monthly contest in April to announce as well! Here they are:

1st. Sonny
2nd. Warlords: Call to Arms
3rd. Shift 2
4th. Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe 3
5th. Super Energy Apocalypse
6th. Kongai Launch
7th. Whiteboardwar
8th. Tank 2008
9th. You Have to Burn the Rope

However, on account of sheer awesomeness, Kongai Launch was again disqualified from the contests, bumping everyone up a notch and allowing the well-deserved Doeo to snag the 9th-place prize.

As usual, the breakdown is $1500 for first, $1000 for second, $700 for third, $500 for fourth, and $250 for everyone else. Implementation of our statistics API is a requirement for claiming contest winnings.

Good news! We're finally ready to move to the new servers we've been talking about for a while. We should have more capacity immediately, and also be in a position to restructure some code to get even bigger improvements over the next few months. Hopefully chat lag and slow page loads will be a thing of the past. The corresponding bad news: the site will be down starting at 10pm Pacific Time Sunday, May 4th (early May 5th for most of you) for many hours. Our current expectation is that the transition will take about 6 hours, but with technology things can always go wrong.

Doeo was the winner last week for $250. Doodle Defender and Abstracta were the two runners-up for $150 each. Also, give Postal Panic a try. It's worthy of an honorable mention.

What a week! Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe 3 was the winner last week for $250. Shift 2 and Super Energy Apocalypse were the two runners-up for $150 each.

Sonny was the winner of last week's contest on Kongregate for $250. The runners-up were Tank 2008 and Jack the Fugitive for $150 each.

Here are the winners from March!

1st. Boxhead: Zombie Wars
2nd. Shift
3rd. Drunken Masters
4th. Synapsis
5th. Drone Wars
6th. Boomstick
7th. Amberial: Nebulosa Realms
8th. DropSum v1.3
9th. Talesworth Arena

That's $1500 for first, $1000 for second, $700 for third, $500 for fourth, and $250 for all the others. As usual, implementing our stats API is a requirement for winners to claim their prize.

And last week, Warlords: Call to Arms was the winner for $250. Synapsis and Whiteboardwar were the two runners-up for $150 each. Technically our Kongai Launch didn't let people down for the second-highest rating, but it was disqualified on account of being too awesome.

The web-sensation Boomstick was the winner last week on Kongregate for $250. The long-awaited, Kongregate-sponsored sequel to Amberial was a runner-up last week for $150, along with Duels Defense.

Dinowaurs, one of Kongregate's premium web games, is now being shown to a few lucky alpha testers. Read more about it here

Kongregate is pleased to announce that we're moving forward with a deal involving both Kongregate.com and Newgrounds.com. The deal will place both sites in a future merger, likely with Newgrounds as the primary shareholder.

In light of this partnership, we're stepping back a bit to re-evaluate the priorities on Kongregate. Due to lack of player enthusiasm over challenges and achievements, we've started phasing these systems out. Expect to see the final challenge released at the end of this month, with the final achievements likely being released a bit sooner.

We've confident, however, that the popularity of Kongregate's upcoming features will far surpass those we've left behind. Expect to see a major expansion of game categories on the site, including an entire menu bar dedicated to Pokemon hentai quizzes, as we strive toward becoming the #1 online destination for the 13- to 14-year-old male demographic.

April 02 Update:
After receiving way more email than we expected objecting to the above news, we've decided to reconsider our plan to remove badges from the site. Especially in light of our Newgrounds merger, it's difficult to imagine playing Pokemon hentai quizzes without achievements.

We would like to extend our thanks to the hordes of borderline illiterate children who filled our inboxes with objections. For once, you've made a difference.

3D in Flash! It must be that time of the year again when someone manages to pull it off. Super Space 3D was the winner last week on Kongregate for $250. ROBOT and The Last Canopy were the two runners-up for $150 each.