I pretty much hate YouTube. Let me qualify that a little -- I hate the YouTube phenomenon. I hate watching the morning news and, interspersed between grave Iraq coverage, interviews with pop culture folk and heartwarming heroic animal stories, there's suddenly THIS WEEK'S HIT SENSATION FUNNY VIDEO FROM THIS NEW THING CALLED THE INTERNETS. Like, YouTube is singlehandedly responsible for launching the Internet meme from "inside joke" to "fucking obnoxious" -- not to mention the continual promotion as funny of things that just aren't. Also, I kind of feel like swapping WACKY VIDEO among my EMAIL FRIENDS is kinda "over," you know? Like, didn't that end when Stile quit writing e/n and just turned into a porn site?Still, I don't hate the idea. I like me a little clip action from time to time, especially when it has to do with video games. But what if instead of video, it was games? Wouldn't that be somethin'? Such is Kongregate, a user-created gaming portal that many of you are probably familiar with. Indie designers upload their flash wizardry, users play, share and rate. It's a cool idea already -- especially since the indie devs get a chunk of the ad revenue on the back end.
Now, they've just announced some $5 million in VC funding, all of which they're going to put towards strengthening the community they've built around the indie game. They've got some really cool developments planned -- adding Xbox Live-style achievements and Facebook-style social networking, and also a new initiative to advance development budget towards independent developers who make multiplayer games that have a microtransactions element.
Kongregate's founder and CEO Jim Greer explains it all in this interview I did with him for Gamasutra -- check it out if you're interested in all the details!
