Kongregate is an online platform where thousands of Flash games can be played. However, it seems that will come to an end by the end of 2020, as support for Adobe Flash will be discontinued.
What is Kongregate? Kongregate is a gaming portal where developers have been able to release their games developed with Adobe Flash since 2006. This means players could open the site, choose a title, and start playing immediately.
Over the years, the site received over 128,000 game submissions spanning all possible genres: from classic puzzle games to shooters and a variety of multiplayer games. Examples include Realm of the Mad God and Bit Heroes.
However, Adobe Flash, which underlies a large portion of Kongregate’s games, will no longer be supported after December 31, 2020. Its place will be taken by HTML 5, which makes the use of Flash obsolete.
Also, the German game “Shakes and Fidget” already switched away from the Flash Player 2 years ago.
Support for Kongregate will be massively curtailed
What will happen to Kongregate? Since Flash games are at the core of Kongregate, the discontinuation of support will also have consequences for the site. In an announcement to the community, the management of Kongregate presented several measures that will be implemented in the near future:
- Submission of new games will no longer be possible starting from July 1.
- The existing games will not receive new badges that players can normally earn by mastering achievements.
- With the exception of 20 chat rooms for specific games, all chat rooms will be shut down.
- Non-gaming-related forums will be removed, and the majority of the remaining forums will be reduced to “read-only” status.
The majority of the social and community features of Kongregate will thus disappear. This is one of the consequences of the general withdrawal of resources for support on the site.
However, players will still be able to play the existing games on the site. And developers will still be able to provide updates for their games. How long this will be the case is, however, unclear.
What does the community say? For the community that has formed over almost 15 years on Kongregate, the news did not come as a surprise. As early as early 2019, after the announcement of the discontinuation of Flash support, the first threads with questions about the future of the site appeared.
Still, the forum post from management elicited mixed feelings. On one hand, players expressed their gratitude in a long thread for the good times on Kongregate and the fun of playing.
Thank you to the Kongregate team. It is sad to see an era come to an end. I have spent 9 years on this site and had many hours of harmless casual fun. I will miss you.
User gruenerkaktus
On the other hand, there were also disappointed voices. Especially the removal of most of the site’s social features was met with bitterness by some users. A former moderator of Kongregate wrote a lengthy post on the subject. He stated that the site and the community would never have grown so large without the social features, condemning the management’s approach:
If anyone thinks that this brand [Kongregate] will survive even a second without its community, they are completely wrong.
User StOtS
What does the future hold? In the message to the community, the management of Kongregate remained very vague about the distant future of the site. The forum post states:
As you know, our business is currently heavily focused on game development and Flash is slowly disappearing from the scene. This means that Kongregate.com must also continue to evolve.
However, how exactly this development will look is unclear. Some users from the Kongregate community speculate in the forums that this could mean a transition to HTML 5. Others suspect that Kongregate wants to put more emphasis on mobile gaming.
Still, others hope that Kongregate’s Flash games will be saved in a similar way as 36,000 games from the Flashpoint project.
