
Kongregate closed to new games, shutting down forums and chat - teej
https://www.kongregate.com/forums/1-kongregate/topics/1916387-important-kongregate-announcement
======
ckocagil
People said Flash wouldn't be missed. People said WebGL and canvas would bring
us a much better experience. It's been nearly a decade since Steve Jobs
declared war on Flash.

Where has the entire browser gaming ecosystem gone to? Kongregate had some of
the most original games I've ever played. Kongregate shutting down doesn't
just sadden me, it infuriates me: all vendors had to do was to sandbox Flash
(which Chrome did!) and not autoplay it. Instead everyone followed the lead of
an arrogant jerk who obviously knew everything better than everyone.

Communities like Kongregate, Armorgames, Newgrounds will never exist again.
There will never be another War of the Web.

~~~
hombre_fatal
You're really barking up the wrong tree here.

What this news really means is that how people are using the web is changing.
When I was younger, browser games were the only real way to play games without
spending money or having my parents buy me a Gameboy (which they never did). I
could get on Newgrounds from any PC at school, it was a big part of my life.

These days, every one of Kongregate's users has a smartphone with free games
more accessible and convenient than the old browser gaming model.

I run an internet writing forum that has also suffered over the years despite
being a relatively massive forum in its hey day. What changed? I think these
are just the affects of the smartphone era. And the centralization of social
media, in my case.

People just don't go to Kongregate anymore, the hey day is over. And it's not
because of Flash/HTML5 -- it's not like users in droves are even thinking
about that. Kongregate has to somehow compete with kids playing Fortnite on
their iPhone before class for free. Times are changing.

~~~
cjsawyer
I miss forums. Not reddit, but things like vBulletin. It felt like a community
of people you would get to know instead of a faceless mass.

~~~
spicymaki
Yes! The faceless mass is caused because the "community" has gotten way too
large. If you want a better experience, you need to build your own community
based on your interests and keep it from getting too large and unmanageable.

~~~
cjsawyer
Maybe this is an unavoidable byproduct of having everybody on the web... I
started using it around 2005, I can’t imagine how people who started with
homepages and newsgroups must feel.

~~~
mtrower
Ornery and irritable - not really that technology moved on, but mostly for
what could have been but wasn't.

Additionally, bemusement - watching people go crazy over Reddit and Slack,
when all I can see is glitzy, more newbie-friendly, centralized incarnations
of Usenet and IRC.

Don't even get me started with Facebook (though, I hear FB isn't even popular
with today's kids - rather, it's that thing old people use.)

------
ljp_206
As a kid, Kongregate was a safe, inclusive space for high-quality games that I
didn't have to fear would mess up a family member's computer. It looks like
that much hasn't changed a lot, which is great.

Sites like this played a large part in increasing my bravery and familiarity
on the web, on which I now earn my living.

~~~
maerF0x0
> that I didn't have to fear would mess up a family member's computer

Save for having flash enabled . Hard to believe they've validated all 128,000
games.

~~~
tkzed49
To be more realistic, Flash was a much smaller attack surface than downloading
and running random executables. I'm guessing that a fairly small number of
kids were actually subject to Flash exploits while playing games on
Kongregate. Compare that to downloading a screensaver...

~~~
TedDoesntTalk
I don’t see the difference between running a Flash app with no sand boxing
whatsoever and a random executable.

~~~
rictic
Security is a continuum, not a binary.

Things that native apps can do trivially but that require explicit permission
for accessed in Flash (or the web in general): filesystem read/write, listen
in on microphones, spy with webcams, etc etc.

If you have a flash zero day (and they totally exist!), you can do those
things, but that significantly raises the difficulty, which reduces the number
of attacks you'll actually see in the wild. Most attackers aren't the NSA or
Mossad, and resources that they have to spend on getting and exploiting zero
days are resources they can't spend on other parts of the exploit chain.

------
javajosh
Some of the best games (and game ideas) I've ever seen, bar none, were on
Kongregate. Flash (and particularly later versions of ActionScript) were just
so good for this kind of programming, and really, even the modern web hasn't
caught up yet. Looking forward though to the next iteration which is HTML5
based...

~~~
slimsag
I am going to miss this a lot, too.

I don't think the "next big thing" here will be HTML5, though. Unity is
_ridiculously_ easy and has led to large swaths of indie games on Steam -
people don't quite understand just how easy it is to make games in Unity these
days. You can pass without understanding coding at all to a large extent, and
reminds me a _lot_ of working in Flash.

If you don't believe me, look up Sam Hogan on YouTube - or search YouTube for
"unity game in 24h". I'm not saying these are all good - but it reminds me a
_lot_ of how Flash enabled rapid development of game ideas.

~~~
jfkebwjsbx
Is this an ad? Not only you mention a single engine, you also sell it as super
easy.

The reality is that making _good_ games is _extremely_ hard, and has always
been.

Unity is not the first game framework, there have been many along the years.
Flash being one of them (while not even designed for that originally!).

Some of them are easier, some are more featureful, some have better graphics,
some are specialized into a genre etc.

While some genres need almost no code, others are full of pages of tricky game
logic. And that is without counting into account the engine code.

Further, Unity had nothing to do with Steam being flooded. The actual reason
is that

    
    
      1- Valve pivoted into being a distribution platform,
      2- they stopped curating what goes in,
      3- gaming exploded and became way more mainstream (along with streaming, e-sports and programming, all which helped a lot), and
      4- people started making money selling courses, degrees and content on how to make games.

~~~
dang
You broke the site guidelines here. Would you mind reviewing
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)?
Note that they ask people not to post insinuations about astroturfing or
shilling.

Your comment is great without that first bit.

~~~
jfkebwjsbx
Thanks dang, I apologize then.

Out of curiosity, how do you deal then with veiled ads etc. in this day and
age?

~~~
dang
By critiquing the content.

I know that's not a perfect answer, but it's pretty much all we have, and the
approach does have one major advantage: it doesn't need to care how veiled an
ad is, or if it's an ad at all.

~~~
jfkebwjsbx
Thanks! I agree in a platform like HN (where readers likely have above average
critical thinking skills) that can work.

~~~
dang
I'm not as optimistic about thinking skills, because manipulation techniques
seem to work anyhow. But barring actual evidence of abuse, I think we mostly
can only try to get better at countering false or distorted information with
more correct information.

------
JeanMarcS
But, but, but... How will I get my badge of the day ? All those shiny
konpanions I collected for years ?

Kongregate is still in my morning ritual, and some new games are still a lot
of fun and enjoyable.

I guess they want to concentrate themselves on their new kartridge product
(not working on Linux...).

But I find this announcement surprising (closing chat) as they just added a
new (and, well, not very useful) feature to it.

Strange. But I hope they’ll have great time in their new adventures.

~~~
ars
I'm in the same boat :(

I have every single Shiny Kongpanion there is, have not missed a single one. I
have around 70% of the badges on the site.

In a way, no more badges means I might actually get to 100 (yah right :) -
except that with flash breaking probably 90% of the games at the end of the
year, there's not really a whole lot of time left to do that.

------
dvaun
There are still old places like Stickpage[0] and Newgrounds[1] that are up.
They feel like relics from the early web before mass consolidation onto social
networks like MySpace took place.

[0]: [https://www.stickpage.com/](https://www.stickpage.com/)

[1]: [https://www.newgrounds.com/](https://www.newgrounds.com/)

~~~
wizzwizz4
Newgrounds is helping develop Ruffle, a Flash player built in Rust that runs
(via WebAssembly, I think, though it technically supports ASM.js via
emscripten) in HTML5 browsers: [https://github.com/ruffle-
rs/ruffle](https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle)

~~~
Yoric
Good luck. I know of a previous Flash player built in Rust that was killed
iirc by Adobe's lawyers after years of development.

~~~
fenomas
Uh, source on that claim? The Flash player specification and even its VM are
both open and unencumbered.

------
Rotdhizon
This is upsetting to see but not surprising. As a daily Kong user, the website
has been going downhill hard over the past decade. Especially over these last
3-5 years, it's been a wasteland of terrible quality games. In it's early
days, Kong was a fantastic place to be. Friendly communities and amazing
games. Especially the earlier RPGs and MMOs. I had such fun on the older MMOs
that have all since been such down. From AA:TG, Odin Quest, Call of Gods,
RotMG, and more. Kong was a huge part of my teenage years.

As Flash started to wane, the quality of games dropped sharply. Even then the
devs who did take the plunge and learn Unity, the games from that released on
Kong rarely lived up to the quality of Flash games. The chat rooms also become
more niche and weird. As an example, there were one or two major teen dating
public chat rooms that they could never get control of. No matter how many
people they banned, they'd just keep making new accounts.

------
grammarnazzzi
I feel like a friend just died.

I had no idea they were folding. They just rolled out a new currency feature
(blocks) 12 days ago.

I've been on the site for so many years. 1936 badges level 73. I'm grieving
and in denial this is even happening!

I subscribed NewGrounds because I don't want them to disappear too

:sad:

------
chillwaves
Browser based games are better than ever. Wonder where it will go next.

My favorite, which was acquired by Kongregate in Dec 2019:

[https://surviv.io](https://surviv.io)

2D Last Man Standing. Great fun.

~~~
badsectoracula
> Browser based games are better than ever.

I disagree, browser based games took a very hard hit after Flash was killed
and the infrastructure that was built around these games died. Newgrounds
might be still limping around, but pretty much everything else, like
Kongregate now, has died and nothing replaced it (most of the sponsors that
funded these games moved to mobile, but very few of the actual developers did
and mobile games are very different than the more raw/brutal flash games you'd
find on pretty much every flash gaming site out there).

The tech, from a purely technical and capabilities perspective, is better
sure. But the ecosystem and tools are much worse.

~~~
fouc
I'm worried about all the great flash games that will disappear when no
browsers can run flash anymore. I hope preservation efforts are successful..

~~~
ahoy
This is a larger problem with software archival. I suspect a lot of the media
created during the fledgeling decades of the "digital" era will simply vanish.

------
jgeralnik
I spent middle school hacking games on Kongregate to obtain badges and high
scores. There were incredible tools available for hacking flash games -
debuggers, decompilers, cheat engine like tools. Most of the tools were
dedicated to kongregate games and allowed easy interfacing with the website.
Years later I tried to remember exactly what tools I had used and what
communities I participated in and was never able to find them.

Anyone else do the same and have a better recollection of the tools you used?

~~~
hyper_reality
Yes! That's how I spent a lot of my spare time too in adolescence. There was a
forum called Kongrehack run by a Swedish guy where game-hacks were shared.
Initially we used Cheat Engine to modify select memory locations in games, but
the game creators came up with better defences to obscure the easy hacks.

Somebody created an entire browser - called something like Niflheim but I
can't remember the exact name - designed for the purpose of cheating
Kongregate APIs. Finally, a subversive guy found a way to submit directly to
the "I have won a badge API" and wrote a program to submit all the badges in
batch. This took the fun out of winning achievements in games, but introduced
many of us to the world of coding, automation, and hacking. Why grind for
hours when you can cheat the scoreboard in seconds?

I also developed a way to cheat on Kongai, which was one of my favourite games
on Kongregate. However I got bored and moved onto other things in life shortly
after. If you were active in this community around 2008, we probably talked to
each other back then.

~~~
jgeralnik
Yes! I was definitely on Kongrehack and used Niflheim. I never used mass
submission of badges, I would break each game individually. Hacking the game
became the challenge, and games that nobody else on Kongrehack had managed to
cheat at were the best challenge of all

~~~
jgeralnik
Some more information - I found this YouTube channel which has videos of
various hacks of Kongregate games. I don't think I ever saw it as a child but
it brings back memories of various things we would do.

Here is a tool called Ragnarok that let's you edit values based on their name.
You would open the reversed actionscript and could play with things based on
the variable name:

[https://youtu.be/B4GhD8Ets8U](https://youtu.be/B4GhD8Ets8U)

Editing save files was big. The files were in a proprietary format called sol.
All of the videos I see on that channel are just "download this save file with
a completed game state", but there were tools for editing the save file
yourself. Some games introduced obfuscation of data in the save file and the
cat and mouse game began.

Oh, here's an example! Apparently the sol editor was a feature of Ragnarok,
and maybe the disassembler too:

[https://youtu.be/wLaMZoqI-_Q](https://youtu.be/wLaMZoqI-_Q)

Here's a video of Niflheim, seems similar to Ragnarok. Maybe Ragnarok replaced
it as a better tool?

[https://youtu.be/fgqHarxwv64](https://youtu.be/fgqHarxwv64)

Other than that it seems most of the cheats on that youtube channel are using
cheat engine. While I definitely used that, I don't recall it being part of my
go-to arsenal.

~~~
hyper_reality
Nice find! That brings back memories. Yeah Ragnarok was the replacement for
Niflheim, although both were buggy and stopped working altogether at some
point.

KongregateHack was really young, impressive that he ran a whole online
community aged 14 or 15. Wonder what he's up to now.

------
sneeuwpopsneeuw
It feels sort of sad to see this website go. It still reminds me of the
kingdom rush games I played a few years ago.

~~~
zornthewise
You can get them in mobile for like a dollar each and they are just as good if
my memory is anything to go by!

~~~
savanaly
Also available on Steam which is where I first played them.

------
madrox
End of an era. Browser gaming is a shadow of its former glory. Many of the
best mobile games started as flash games here. Then Steve Jobs declared war on
Flash and made in-app purchase games possible. Now casual games are the pay-
to-win nonsense you see on the App Store.

If free markets are truly what is best for consumers, then casual gaming isn’t
a free market.

------
JoshTriplett
For people looking for alternatives, try
[https://www.reddit.com/r/WebGames/](https://www.reddit.com/r/WebGames/) ,
which specifically lists games that can be played within a browser.

------
arusahni
The community was great - I still talk to some of the folks from the chat
rooms I used to mod. I loved the dev community that sprung up around the site,
too, with useful userscripts and assistant apps.

End of an era. Thanks for all the memories, Kongregate.

~~~
_1100
I kick myself sometimes for not being around when they cut down on chat rooms
and I never got reconnect with anyone in Ninja chat.

Jeez I was so young, I’d just log in to kongregate, type “i liek ninjas”
because that was how people knew I was at my keyboard, and then spend the
whole day playing flash games.

I did this hundreds of times over many years, took a break during college, and
when I came back they’d culled down the number of chat rooms.

Guess I’m just replying to vent, and to also say thanks for all the good
times, Kongregate.

------
TedDoesntTalk
> Certain ... forums ... will be removed from the site

I no longer contribute to any forums because of stuff like this.

There were various forums I’ve contributed to over the years — sometimes
posting thousands of times over 5-10 years. Then the forum is migrated to new
software (losing all user accounts or posts), or shutdown for good.

Mozilla did this several times.

Why bother spending the time to contribute towards an online community when
your credibility in that community can be removed when new management comes in
and decides to change forum software or shutdown forums altogether? I imagine
it’s how Yahoo Groups people felt.

Even my posting to HR is limited to stuff that I guess will be gone one day.

Nothing lasts forever.

~~~
SenoraRaton
Is not the post you just posted on a "forum"

A rose by any other name is still a rose.

~~~
TedDoesntTalk
Yep. And read my comment about HN at the end.

~~~
saagarjha
I think you mistyped it as "HR".

------
blitztime
This is very sad news. I spent a great deal of time in my childhood playing
games on Kongregate. I remember reading strategy guides for Kongai, their CCG
that admitted wasn't very good but I always tried to complete the game
challenges to earn that weeks Kongai card.

Eventually it seemed like everyone moved away from browser games to console
and PC games, at least that was true for me. It's been a long time since I've
even thought about Kongregate, but it's still sad to see it go.

------
JohnDeHope
I was literally just starting to surf their dev pages to get back into some
very light HTML game design. I don’t have nearly enough time to make an actual
game with an actual game engine. But I’m a professional web developer so I can
smack HTML around with a little bit of JavaScript no problem. Now I’m not sure
what to do. Is [https://ldjam.com/](https://ldjam.com/) the new home for this
sort of thing? Newgrounds?

~~~
lewispollard
Itch.io game jams. Check out Phaser.js, a javascript WebGL games framework,
it's dead easy if you know a little JS.

------
ars
Reading between the lines it seems they can not handle the volume of spam they
are getting. (Many forums going read-only, and chat rooms shutting down.)

~~~
wizzwizz4
Sounds more like they're trying to gently kick the community out, because
they're shutting down the site-as-we-know-it. Gently, because Kongregate is
still pretty cool.

------
jpt4
The Immortal Grand Prix flash game from 2003 [0] was the single best turn
based tactics game I've yet encountered online. Does anyone know whether it is
still hosted somewhere, how one might self host Flash games (assuming one had
the Shockwave files), or of games comparable to this one?

[0] [https://youtu.be/VGxhmhNJ9qo](https://youtu.be/VGxhmhNJ9qo)

------
dlbucci
I remember joining there when they announced they would have medals (Xbox 360
achievements had just become a thing, and were big). Played a lot of great
games and had some fun chatting, too! But the one I maybe think of the most is
Desktop Tower Defense (1.5, maybe?), as it was all the rage when I joined.
Christ, that was 13 years ago! Gonna have to revisit that soon, I suppose...

------
smrk007
How feasible would it be to clone the entirety of the website? (Scrape games,
recreate all functionality, etc.)

------
derivagral
Funny timing; I was considering whether I wanted to use their platform to try
a concept or two and get "free" social support, but now I suppose I'll have to
figure out handling that on my own.

Also wonder how much of this is business/cost optimization vs user-generated
liability.

------
SimianLogic2
My dream has always been for one of the consoles to buy the scraps of Flash
from Adobe, add good controller/save support, and then open it up to
developers to make 2D games. Having shipped games in Java, Flash/AS3, haxe,
objective c, swift, javascript, unity -- I've never been as productive and
happy as when I was using Flash. Swift/SpriteKit is pretty nice, but I'm tired
of the Apple treadmill and seeing my games die after a few years unless I put
more work into them.

------
frenchie4111
RIP. I got my start in software engineering building and publishing (crappy)
games to Kongregate. It was a wonderful site, and it will be missed.

------
Sniffnoy
Man, I just hope someone can somehow bring back Kongai (and fix the remaining
bugs). That game was amazing; it was just a poor fit for what it was used for.
(A difficult competitive game used as a sitewide metagame on a site full of
quick casual games...? What were they thinking? But the game was amazing!
There's just not really any good way to play it anymore.)

------
mrkramer
I never played a video game on Kongregate because when I was interested in
browser games Miniclip was number 1 in Europe.

I think browser games kinda died when smartphones came around because you got
better experience when playing a game naively than in a smartphone browser.

But I think browser games technology is better than ever and there are a lot
of opportunities to explore in that industry.

------
Causality1
If they want to become a mainstream game developer, gutting an established
fanbase and community seems counterproductive.

------
atcg0101
I wonder if this is the beginning of Kongregate's integration and deployment
of Forte powered features: [https://blog.kongregate.com/kongregate-announces-
partnership...](https://blog.kongregate.com/kongregate-announces-partnership-
with-forte/)

~~~
ars
They already delivered something with Forte. You earn "blocks" now for getting
the weekly kongpanion.

You were supposed to be able to exchange them for chat stickers.

The launch was a disaster, partly breaking the site for 2 days, and they had
to disable the stickers.

And without chat, I don't see much point in the stickers. (Maybe they'll find
something else to do with the blocks, stickers were never that interesting to
me anyway.)

In a way you can say that rather than the beginning, Forte actually killed
Kongregate, probably by draining developer time and budget.

~~~
atcg0101
I did not know that they already had started with a public roll out of Forte
powered features. Thanks for the added insight!

------
at_a_remove
I was never big on Flash games but I did enjoy one on Kongregate: a card-based
game inspired heavily by the various works of H.P. Lovecraft.

I get it, Flash is buggy and second in being a security mistake only to PDFs.
Still, it's a shame these little games will be forgotten, swept aside.

------
tarkin2
Flash posed a threat to Apple’s walled garden.

Apple wants you to download an iPhone app (and buy the iPhone for that)

If all a user needs to do is open a browser tab, on any device, and have an
good app-like experience they hardly need an iPhone.

The web never really caught up with the experience flash gave the user.

And Apple benefited.

~~~
Pulcinella
Can’t you still open a browser tab? Web apps do exist. How is that any
different?

~~~
tarkin2
As mentioned elsewhere, the experience flash gave has never been beat in most
cases.

------
ianai
So what happened to this site? Did people move onto something else (a site) or
was it smartphones?

~~~
ars
It was killed by Flash. Adobe is not just going to stop updating flash, they
are outright force disabling it at the end of the year, even for people
willing to risk it.

This kills the majority of the games on Kongregate.

~~~
8note
And thus shockwave, with its .exe outputs wins in the end for old games?

~~~
hobs
Eh, you can still run a flash decompiler and recompile it to an exe (which
embeds the flash player) [https://github.com/jindrapetrik/jpexs-
decompiler](https://github.com/jindrapetrik/jpexs-decompiler)

------
libraryatnight
Sad to see Flash going out like this. It was such an easy tool for any
creative to put to use and then share the result.

------
timvdalen
I've got to say, I still visit kong every couple of days to see if there are
any cool new games. I will miss it.

------
winrid
I still remember loading up Kitty Cannon over dial up in the farm house in our
small town of seven in Western PA.

Nostalgia.

RIP Kongregate.

------
Kiro
How did games work on Kongregate? Did people makes games specifically for the
platform with their APIs?

~~~
ars
Typically they would have an existing game and then integrate the APIs into
the game.

You didn't have to do that, You could still upload your game without it. It
was just if you wanted a chance of getting badged. And badged games had way
more plays. So there was a lot of incentive to do it.

------
whereistimbo
my fav games on kongregate:
[https://archive.vn/pPJwB](https://archive.vn/pPJwB)

~~~
whereistimbo
web.archive.org
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200701213611/https://www.kongr...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200701213611/https://www.kongregate.com/accounts/whereistimbo/favorites)

~~~
whereistimbo
[https://www.google.com/collections/s/list/Gik0oLzvfLI3Vb58dO...](https://www.google.com/collections/s/list/Gik0oLzvfLI3Vb58dOkBPqpWoKYDtQ/mDO-
uGaVGZQ) my google collection of article

[https://www.google.com/collections/s/list/Yvht3mJiT6aaJJQbQG...](https://www.google.com/collections/s/list/Yvht3mJiT6aaJJQbQGA9oA/cyCVhmLaHAY)
my google collection of later plan

------
KiDD
Oooof.

I Loved Kongregate Games!

