Video game publisher and web gaming company Kongregate is no longer accepting new submissions for its Kongregate.com gaming portal, the company has announced. As of this writing, Kongregate’s site says there are 128,655 games available on the service, and the announcement means there are unlikely to ever be more. Kongregate says it’s also shutting down many of the site’s social features, and GameIndustry.biz reports that it’s made a number of layoffs as part of the changes.
“You will still be able to play our existing library of over 128,000 amazing games and developers will be able to update their games as normal,” Kongregate said in its statement.
It’s unlikely to come as much of a surprise that the company is shifting resources away from its site, which it described as a “legacy Flash gaming platform” in a statement to GameIndustry.biz. In 2017, Adobe announced that it would end support for Flash this year, and multiple browsers now block the standard by default. For now, you can still manually enable Flash to play many of the games on Kongregate.com, but it’s a legacy technology.
The end of Flash has raised questions about how the thousands of games that rely on it are going to be preserved. For its part, Kongregate has partnered with Rochester’s The Strong National Museum of Play to preserve its Flash games. The collaboration will see the museum download and preserve the games so that they continue to be available for education and research, and it will take steps to ensure the games continue to be playable.
Although Kongregate says that its existing library of games will still be available, many of the site’s social features will be disabled on July 22nd. Around 20 of the game-specific chat rooms will remain open. But most will close, along with chat rooms that aren’t associated with any specific game. Certain non-gaming forums will disappear from the site, while “most” others will become read-only, allowing only admins to post. Forums for Kongregate’s own games like Bit Heroes will not be affected, the company said, and it will be dedicating fewer resources to supporting the site overall.
As well as needing to reflect broader changes in the gaming industry, Kongregate told GameIndustry.biz that the COVID-19 pandemic has also had a negative impact on its business. “That’s why we had to take this unfortunate step to reshape our organization,” it said.
Kongregate also confirmed that it’s making a number of layoffs as part of the changes. The company confirmed the layoffs to GameIndustry.biz, without disclosing an exact number. “We can confirm that we have made the difficult, but necessary decision to let a number of appreciated team members go today,” the company said in a statement.
Kongregate said that its business is currently “largely focused” on developing games.