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After all, you can’t play Crysis at work. Unless you’re us.

IGN has been closely following Kongregate, one of the best sites around for free Flash games. We learned a few months ago the site was planning to fund premium, large-scale titles that will still be free to play but will have microtransaction components. Today Kongregate unveiled the first five premium games that should start appearing next March or April, in one month intervals.

“With our Premium Development Program, we’ve set out to find and sponsor some of the most talented small studio and indie developers today,” said Jim Greer, CEO and co-founder of Kongregate. “These original and exclusive Flash games will build on the compelling social and community-based experiences already available on Kongregate, but on a larger scale. For developers, Kongregate provides a wonderful launching pad for new content, where funded developers still retain full rights to their games and share in a percentage of Kongregate’s revenue.”

While retail PC and console games get a lot more attention than Flash offerings, Kongregate doesn’t see them as competition.

“We ask for a year of exclusivity for the game,” says Chris Pasley, Director of Games at Kongregate, who came from Adult Swim’s Flash game portal. “We don’t own the IP, we don’t own any of the rights except to have that game on our site for a year. And we do share revenue during that year and forever more it’s on the site. After that year they can do whatever they want to with it, put it on any site they want to. But even during that year of exclusivity, as long as it’s a non-competing platform like Xbox Live Arcade we are more than happy to let those guys go and put their game on a different platform. It’s not directly competing with us so it’s not going to hurt us.”

Pasley believes the relevance of Flash games is increasing.

“People want to kind of jump in and jump out of games, and Flash is the best way to do it. There’s also a very low barrier to entry. Everyone has a computer that can run Flash games, more or less. You can use your computer at home to play, you can go to the library to play… You can’t really drag your console around wherever you go.”

Are the developers working on Kongregate’s premium games doing it full-time? Or are they hobbyists with day jobs?

“I think it’s about half and half. Most of them are young in the field, even if they are full-time at the moment. A couple are doing it in their spare time, but they are really dedicated to doing it. I don’t know how they sleep much.”

Kongregate gave us the rundown on its first five premium offerings:

Dinowaurs - In development by Intuition Games, Dinowaurs is a multiplayer trajectory shooter in which cute, innocent cartoon dinosaurs battle unknowingly to the death in real-time. Dumb and ignorantly sweet, these dinos don’t think a thing about their cruel, barbaric human handlers strapping things like missile launchers, cannons and even aircraft carriers to their backs to wage war - inadvertently causing their own extinction.

“I had been pitched Dinowaurs at Adult Swim and it was turned down for not pushing the limit enough [there],” says Pasley. “But they pitched it next to Kongregate and when I took the job here I had the opportunity to greenlight the game.

Pasley likes to describe Dinowaurs as “Barney the dinosaur with a rocket launcher strapped to his back running through the D-Day scene from Saving Private Ryan.”

Zening - Created by developer Michael King, Zening is a futuristic strategy game that casts the player in the role of Katrina, a hospitalized war journalist who begins having startlingly vivid dreams of war and battle with horrific fantasy creatures. With the help of other ensnared dreamers, Katrina must fight through the monsters to uncover the terrible truth behind the dreams. Zening also features team deathmatch multiplayer modes, two- and four-player combat, webcam support and a fully voiced narrative.

“[Zening] has an interesting, unique story that we’re hoping to accentuate with full voice over,” Pasley says.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 5:08 pm and is filed under GENERAL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.