Ascent: Newgrounds vs. Kongregate.

On the 4th of August I uploaded my game to Kongregate. Since that time it's had 457 plays on that site.

On the 11th of August I uploaded the same game to Newgrounds. Since that time it's had 40,000 plays.

It's funny to think about it now, but I actually uploaded it to Newgrounds as an afterthought. Why? Because of Construct 2's seamless integration of Kongregate's API, and the carrot of leaderboard functionality dangling before me.

Well, after receiving only 300-something plays I was a bit let down and thought my game deserved more exposure (as, I'm sure, every game developer feels with every game they make). So I casually uploaded it to Newgrounds, thinking there was nothing to lose at this point.

The game was promoted to the front page, from which position it was able to rise to become the most played game of the week. Whereas I've had a handful of comments on Kongregate, on Newgrounds I've accrued 22 pages of feedback. Only a minority of it is constructive, but that minority drowns the feedback from Kongregate into nothingness.

I'm making this thread to champion Newgrounds as a fruitful avenue for getting exposure and feedback for your game. Kongregate seems to have the ascendency around here, with its official support within Construct 2, and the stickied thread for Kongregate games you can see in this subforum. But ignoring Newgrounds could be a big mistake.

More HTML5 games uploaded to Newgrounds might have the knock-on effect of them introducing that much desired API for HTML5 games too.

Ascent Newgrounds

Ascent Kongregate

Interesting stats. Thanx for sharing.

And very fun game! (my record is 17432 meters)

I know its kind of a necroposting but the thing have not changed.

Newgrounds is tops Kongregate in all areas. Yet it is Kongregate which has an official C2 intergration.

I wish Dev team could finaly make an official Newgrounds API plugin.

Tom Ashley

I'm bringing this thread back from the dead again, as I just now noticed it.

A Newgrounds plugin for C2 sounds like a great idea.

I'd already been considering Newgrounds but seeing this old thread did cement my decision to release my new little adventure game (Spiral Skies) there.

So, thanks for the advice.

I did look at Alexa rankings for the two sites:

Kongregate is currently the 1608th most visited website on the internet.

Newgrounds ranks 4100.

I also checked SimilarWeb's rankings, which placed Kongregate at #1075 and Newgrounds at #2161.

They also estimated 32 million visits to Kongregate and 18 million to Newgrounds, in the last six months.

Kongregate has about 106,000 games.

Newgrounds has a total of about 3300... but they also have some categories that aren't games. Videos, for example.

I examined the ranking systems for games and I think it's significantly trickier to get noticed on Kongregate if your game isn't above 3.5 stars (A lot of games with lower user ratings fall through the cracks) but that Newgrounds makes it a lot easier for games with middling ratings to get discovered.

My conclusion? If you have a truly exceptional game, and are really confident you'll be above 3.5 stars, Kongregate may generate a ton of attention for your work. Otherwise, Newgrounds is more promising. It is almost as popular and there's much less competition in the games category on Newgrounds right now.

The Pareto principle, while a good rule of thumb, doesn't always apply. Kongregate heavily biases its results towards the most popular games, the 1-3% of the games submitted that can break through the clutter and grab attention and ratings good enough to be listed highly on a category.

Newgrounds is a better option for decent but not outstanding games. You might actually be seen there with games that are good but not great.

I'm releasing [Spiral Skies] on both in the next few days but now I'm thinking Newgrounds is a safer bet as I'm not certain that my project will climb above 3.5/5 on Kongregate.

It could happen, but there's always a lot of cynicism and negativity on the internet so it is a hard thing to make something that is so good it will rank well.

Some links and pics related to Spiral Skies:

http://www.panoramicworlds.com/kompozer/html/spiral.html

http://matthornb.newgrounds.com/

matthornb - If you're patient, there's hopefully an updated plugin on the way....

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