Kongregate, An Indie Game Incubator From GameStop

We were delighted to see a few iOS games in attendance last week at GameStop Expo. iOS games are so often built by independent developers that they aren’t always able to make it out to events of this size. Luckily for the four games we got our hands on, their developers partnered with a GameStop company, Kongregate.

Kongregate had a fairly small booth, but it was the Sexy Peter giveaway that really caught our attention. Little did we know that there was much more value in that booth than we initially thought. It turns out that Kongregate is somewhat of an indie game incubator. Developers can submit their free-to-play games to Kongregate’s website where they can test their game ideas and build an audience. This allows developers to gauge interest in an idea before investing a lot of time and effort into the mobile app development process.

Kongregate brought three of their popular titles that had been made into iOS apps along with one that was soon to be released. Those titles were Pocket Politics, Tinker Island, Animation Throwdown, and Buffalo Bison. Each of the games had their own unique gameplay style, but every one that I played had me hooked for hours. Stay tuned for a detailed review of each of these titles.

I was impressed not only by the quality of each game, but how Kongregate represented the indie developers that they supported. I had a chance to speak with one of the game producers in the booth, Peter Eykemans, about their business and was pleasantly surprised to hear about their focus on indie game developers. I had no idea that GameStop was a game publisher as well as a retail outlet. It’s great to hear of companies using their popularity for good, and I’m sure that we’ll continue to see many more great titles coming from Kongregate in the future.