Now that Kongregate is approaching its self-inflicted death, the very last hours of posting will be used to deliver a critical exhortation to the remaining Kong staff: Do what is right, and unpublish every last freemium idle game on this site. Idle games are the most cynical incarnation of money-grabbing devs pumping out swill to entrap a few suckers before moving on to the next big thing. Polluting a site that has such a special and deep history with what is essentially scams is unconscionable. Flash games and the portals that published them are central to the culture of creativity that began in the early internet, Idle games are a plague on the tradition of web games, requiring you to pay exorbitant sums of money to progress.At heart, an idle game is just waiting. And waiting. And waiting. And if you wait long enough, maybe you'll prestige for the 1338th time and finally get to the next upgrade. Souds like a terrible sort of game, right? Never fear, the devs of every idle game have got your back. If you pay them ridiculous amounts of money, they'll speed up the game for you and you'll be on your merry way again, watching those exponents increase like clockwork. But, the math behind the game makes it so that the boost you just bought for $20 becomes obsolete very quick, at which point you'll either be forced to give up playing or be right back in the premium shop with another $20 bill the devs will be only too happy to take off your hands. At this point in the essay, the careful reader will notice that I have left something out. Surely the frugal idle player could play without paying at all and enjoy the game just as much as someone who emptied their bank account for HolyDay Studios. Well, not really. The mathematical underpinnings of the game are such that without without paying constantly for boosts etc. finishing these types of idle games would take amounts of time that are not meaningful in the human sense - we're talking thousands or even millions of years of optimal gameplay. If the Pharaoh Ramses II had started playing NGU Idle in 1303 BC without paying a single cent for progression, he still wouldn't be near the endgame content. The point is this: idle games replace difficulty and innovative mechanics with only a single barrier to victory: money. Every idle game with premium content is a cynical, money-grubbing scam by devs too lazy to invent anything new who instead turn to leeching off the biological need for validation. Indeed, many idle games turn into abandonware fairly quickly, because the point of creating them is not to make a respectable game but to soullessly churn out profits until the next game is released. If Kongregate hosted only a few of these abominations, that would be one thing. However, the entire site seems to be dedicated to this sort of intellectual waste, which shows how far the site has fallen. Years ago (ok boomer) Kong was a hub of creativity and original thought, dedicated to fostering the growth and development of the nascent art of web games. Kong was here for the art and for the players. Now, though, Kong has gone down the same path idle devs went, seeing web games as a simple calculation: how many people can I rip off before they get tired of it? Idle games have not only cluttered up Kongregate with their unclean presence, but have corrupted the very soul of this place we used to love. That brings us to the present. Kong is dying. Everyone knows it - the devs, the players, the admins who are still at Kong (RIP Greg). The question, then, is how we want to remember this once-shining beacon. I, for one, don't want to watch what's left of Kong rot, infested and bloated with the maggots of idle games still burrowing into the festering flesh to extract every cent they still can. That is a demise to be ashamed of. Better to remember Kong the way it was: bright and vivacious, indie and 100% grassroots creation. My pleas are finished. I implore the remaining admins to do the right thing, and usher Kong to its final resting place with the dignity Kong deserves. Free of leeches, parasites, and money-grubbing idle games.

> *Originally posted by **[Thunderbolt400](/forums/9268/topics/1919501?page=1#13435301)**:* > Now that Kongregate is approaching its self-inflicted death, the very last hours of posting will be used to deliver a critical exhortation to the remaining Kong staff: Do what is right, and unpublish every last freemium idle game on this site. They fired all the half decent staff already, the ones left are the cheap asshole grifters. > Idle games are the most cynical incarnation of money-grabbing devs pumping out swill to entrap a few suckers before moving on to the next big thing. Polluting a site that has such a special and deep history with what is essentially scams is unconscionable. Flash games and the portals that published them are central to the culture of creativity that began in the early internet, Monetization of flash games has been going on for a while, I agree that there was something genuinely magical about the early days of free, ad-free flash games for kids to play and develop their art talents, but the space is now too monetized for these kinds of indie movements now. Think about how aggressive advertizing and how even kids are being constantly targeted with MTX that are hidden as in-game currencies. > [idle games] Yep, but in fairness this is very old, even in text-based browser games of the mid 2000s, there were already powerups for these kind of games. >[free stuff] Well yeah, you can still play existing flash games until the end of support on the platform. That's not going anywhere, just don't expect any new games to be free/MTX-free and good at the same time. > The point is this: idle games replace difficulty and innovative mechanics with only a single barrier to victory: money. Every idle game with premium content is a cynical, money-grubbing scam by devs too lazy to invent anything new who instead turn to leeching off the biological need for validation. Indeed, many idle games turn into abandonware fairly quickly, because the point of creating them is not to make a respectable game but to soullessly churn out profits until the next game is released. This is more or less all new games these days, it is very easy to reskin and sell something on a separate platform and reap in more profits although the underlying gameplay hasn't changed much. >[Good old days] Yes, but this is more of an industry level change than one good website getting taken over. Many games have been difficult to sustain, not to mention Kong has its own running costs that have been exarcerbated by poor management and acquisition decisions. > [Legacy] Imho, Kong's legacy is finished, it'll be something that zoomers and millenials will remember like gen X remember club penguin or something. As long as Kong exists on the wayback machine, some of its legacy will exist, but don't hope for much more. > My pleas are finished. I implore the remaining admins to do the right thing, and usher Kong to its final resting place with the dignity Kong deserves. Free of leeches, parasites, and money-grubbing idle games. Most of the admins are already invested in these brain numbing games.

shitposting in chatrooms. random censoring of notty words. and tech support blocking my email for some insane reason.