After a long, long time, the death of Adobe Flash is upon us. This week, the free browser game portal Kongregate has just announced that it will stop accepting new submissions to the site. Several staff members have been laid off and the site is slowly moving towards only developing and publishing games. For now, everything hosted on the site will remain there and will be playable, but they will be the last games that Kongregate will ever host.
For quite a while now, Kongregate has been reinventing itself. It moves form web game hosting to publishing games. Back in 2017, Kongregate launched its very own Kartridge storefront. A few days ago, the company announced that they will no longer be in the business of publishing free browser games. Starting now, the site will stop accepting new game submissions.
In an announcement made on their forum, Kongregate mentioned that the site was first created in 2006. In the following years, Kongregate, as a company, has slowly grown and it has adjusted due to some changes that affected the entire gaming community. These days, the company’s business is focusing on developing games and on flash, which is slowly starting to go away. Essentially, this means that Kongregate.com, as a brand, has to change even more.
Starting on July 22, Kongregate will roll back some of its more social features. Chat rooms that are not part of specific games, and there are about 20 of those, will all be closed down. Forums that are not in the gaming category are all being completely wiped from the Kongregate website, while most other forums will simply be moved to a read-only state. The only updates to these forums will happen via admin announcements. The site, as a whole, takes a step back, and less support will be given to Kongregate.