subject: Social Gaming Portals: A List/Review (FLASH) [print this page] Social Gaming Portals: A List/Review (FLASH)
Flash Games have grown extremely popular since 2000, back in the day flash games were not powerful because of the limits off the programming language and the Flash Player Limits, but since then the Programming language, player has had many updates to ensure the best.
The increase in flexibility offered developers a platform that was easier, better and much more fun developing in.
Now, There's a growth in "Social Gaming" Especially in the flash related niche.
Social Gaming Portals generally offer flash games like the other portals but offer something EXTRA for their users which normally depends on the Site itself.
The normal features for these sites are:
Profiles
Game Submissions
Rating, Reviews
Games
Favorite lists
Friends
These are only some of the features offered.
Many of these sites attract millions of gamers and their social features are the reasons they come back. Some of these sites offer a share in revenue to encourage developers to share their games but some offer traffic back to the developers site
But here are a list of portals and their features.
Games - Kongregate - Offers alot of games uploaded by users (developers). Users can make profiles, friends, fans and also add games to favorites. Rating and commenting on the games judge which games are featured in homepage.
Free Online Games - Flash Jolt - Offers games also uploaded by users, User profiles. Challenges, Hiscores and Achievements for games that support the "FlashJolt API". LiveStream which tells you what your friends are up to. Currently the site offers LiveStream for User's Profiles but also plan to offer a public version which will show what all the users are doing, and also a dashboard version which lets you see what you and your friends are upto (according to tweets by the site @FlashJolt and their release). Also offers ratings, reviews, Game Favorites, Fans, Friends, and a few other cool features.
Newgrounds.com... - Newgrounds - Sometimes called a "Social site" but generally is a place for developers to upload their games, animations etc.
GameGum - GameGum - Games, and many user related features. Shares ad revenue with game uploaders and also has Pulse which is similar to FlashJolt's LiveStream although Pulse is only "What everyone is doing" rather than FlashJolt's What your friends, Everyone etc are doing...
Theres probably about 2-3 other gaming sites that are "known" for their Social features, but this is my list:)
