Earlier this year, we announced a $100M developer fund to help accelerate the adoption of blockchain technology in games. We believe blockchain will unlock new economic and creative opportunities for the games community at large, and have been building easy-to-use tools using open protocols like Interledger so developers can properly — and effectively — harness the potential that blockchain offers games.
But we haven’t been doing it alone. We’ve been working closely with a diverse and immensely talented group of developer partners to help ensure that our platform technologies meet their needs, while also leveraging our experience in economy and game design to help them build the best experiences for their respective player communities. Kongregate is one of those developers.
Games have an incredible ability to move us: we feel ecstatic when finally topping a long-standing high score; we feel triumphant when finally beating a boss battle that, until the very moment of victory, seemed insurmountable; and we feel a deep sense of loss when a character we’re emotionally invested in perishes in an engrossing narrative.
Games can also move us in a more literal way: they bring us together as players. We used to see it in the massive crowds at local arcades, then later at home during the console revolution of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Today, games bring us together online. Sometimes this is playing cooperatively with each other, and other times playing competitively against each other, like when we’re vying for the top spot in an esports competition.
Sometimes, though, games bring us together through online communities. Kongregate is one such community. In 2006, the long-running gaming portal set out to provide independent developers with an open platform to host their games and engage directly with their player communities—a refreshingly progressive and prescient move at the time given today’s gaming landscape. Over a decade later, the portal’s become a resounding success, and currently hosts over 125K games, all free for players around the world to enjoy.
Kongregate has grown to be much more than its enormously popular web portal, though. Today, they are also a game developer, publisher, and PC games platform responsible for over 250M game downloads, multiple Editor’s Choice titles, and a combined community of over 8M players—each a remarkable achievement on its own, but extraordinary together.
While Kongregate’s track record speaks for itself, where we really connected with them was in their mission: to nurture the growth and health of independent game developers and player communities.
At Forte, the tools and services we’re building for developers directly support this mission. It also aligns with our games history as well, as our team members spent the last two decades helping game developers by creating industry-standard tools, and fostering thriving player communities through deep player engagement.
We’re building the Forte platform to jumpstart a new generation of games where the player-developer relationship is both healthier and more sustainable. As such, we intimately understand, genuinely appreciate, and fully support Kongregate’s mission. And it’s why they’re one of our first developer partners in bringing blockchain technology to the masses.
Kongregate will be using the Forte platform to create an engaging community program that lets players earn rewards by completing unique challenges, playing games on their portal, and more. These blockchain-based rewards will be fully controlled by the players, and will help strengthen Kongregate’s developer and players communities in ways not possible until now. Expect to hear more details in the coming months.
We’re absolutely delighted to be partnering with Kongregate, and look forward to seeing how blockchain technology will help bring their developers and players closer together than ever before.
Be sure to follow Kongregate and Forte for upcoming partner news, platform updates, and more.