I’m all for people trying to make money off of a game- after the competition. That will also give the developer some time to ad bug fixes, feature requests, and a chance to make it a full game instead of something put together in a single weekend.

I personally dislike kongregate because they spam the player with ads and “join now” requests, but obviously plenty of people are willing to put up with those annoyances to play free games. In the end it’s up to you. I generally only play games that are hosted on a developer’s actual site, and I tend to avoid sites like armor games or kongregate. But that’s just me.

I would never consider posting the original version of my game (the one people rate during the competition) behind an ad-wall, but that still leaves me with a high degree of uncertainty about where to host the post-competition version of my game that I’m working on. Unless I’m over-thinking it and all the gripes about ad-walls really only apply to people who use Kongregate to host the version of their game that they intend to be rated during an LD competition.

Can anyone help me sort this out or offer suggestions? I just entered my first ever LD, and I’d hate to alienate myself from the community early on with a simple mistake like this. I’m interested in increasing my exposure outside LD if possible, but if push came to shove, I’d pick LD over non-LD any day. Everybody on here seems amazing and friendly, and that, in the end, is way more important to me than trying to generate ad revenue or outside exposure.

I did manage to play and enjoy your game, but I’m not sure whether any other people had trouble getting to it. You seem like a talented developer, so I would suggest looking into getting some basic cheap hosting for yourself!

But I also think that kongregate is taking advantage of its customers. Now that they’ve built up their user base, they can start doing things like forcing video ads. And nobody can really do anything, because they’re locked into the site because it already has the user base they’re targeting. So it’s a bit of an annoying cycle of not having any other choices, which seems to go against the indie developer spirit. At the very least, indie developers might consider looking into alternatives that don’t force the players to watch ads or inundate them with spammy JOIN NOW prompts. Part of being an indie developer, I think, is winning players over who are sick of this crap from big companies. Just something for people to consider.

We’re playing these games for the benefit of the person who wrote the game. So making us watch ads before doing so is a bit like saying “Oh, you’ll wash my car for free? Cool! But first give me five dollars!”

Part of my goal of my site (I’m not trying to self-advertise, but the site is partly a reaction to this gripe about other sites) is to provide an alternative to sites like mediafire or dropbox, at least for Java and Processing developers. So it’s a little hard to believe that there are simply no good free sites for flash developers that don’t show obnoxious ads and spammy JOIN NOW PLZ messages.

But ok, I now get your point on the ease of use of Kongregate. I was thinking about a long term vision (at least more than 2 days of work), but it’s true that here people are mostly going to make one-shot games. (That’s not a criticism, I’m among those people).

But 2-3 years ago, when I started, I would’ve been utterly terrified. Newbie gamedevs have a lot of stuff on their minds, and suddenly adding multiple challenges (that only seem tangentially related) does not help AT ALL, especially should that happen during a 48h-gamejam when you’re stressed and panicked and don’t even know wheter you can finish what you’re currently working, not even mentioning how it might fare critically.

I agree, having an own platform does have its benefits. …once you know how to set it up and take care of it. Until that point arises it’s much more efficient to go with other options.

Then, for the price of a little more efforts, you have something that you can use to develop your game further : you can put a blog to talk about the evolutions, put some reviews from other websites, and so on. And you can even put advertisement if you want to get money (even though unless you have hundreds of players, it most likely won’t make you rich).

But yeah, Kongregate has the real advantage of not having any efforts to make to have a good exposure and that’s something I totally understand. I’d love to find a good solution to have the exposure I could have on kongregate with the flexibility of a private host for developping my ideas further, however I did not find any good solution so far.

Indeed, ads sucks. Forced-video-ads especially.

I use Kongregate to host games myself (and know many others who regularly host on similar sites, like Armor Games or Newgrounds). But there are so many advantages to it that I feel it outweighs the minor annoyance of a short (mostly closeable) ad.

- Ease of use. You get a step-by-step walkthrough on how to host your stuff. Especially for newcomers it can be very stressful to figure out how to host a game on their own in the short time-frame. Dropbox made it easier, sure, but it still lacks instructions.

- Exposure. A game on Kongregate automatically gets players beyond Ludum Dare, and can grow from there. I’ve learned the first influx of LDers helps the game get attention. Also, typing in the name of the game usually gives you a top-spot in google-results, something that takes time without a dedicated host.

I once hosted a game myself and uploaded it to Kong a few months later, and it lacked the first wave of competition-voters, thus never getting off the ground outside the competition.

- Metrics. We can immediately see how many people played the game, how they rated it and what they thought. You can see how long your game stays “fresh” and when it flatlines. Yes, there are possibilities for this for your own site, but they require a lot more work & research.

- Revenue. Yes, it’s often minor, but it can be a cash-amount you get for a few hundred plays, and that is then /money you made with a game/. The ego-boost is awesome .

So yes, ads do suck. But as you say, this is about FUN. We want to MAKE GAMES, and put them out there as quickly as possible to be played. Fiddling around with hosting and metric-tools is definitely not fun, but also complicated and intimidating, so I believe an ad-based host is a valid alternatively.

(within reason, of course. They “wait 120 sec till download”-site I once landed at pissed me off immensely)

-Matthew