Very big congratulations to HeyZap - I had a chance to meet the team a bit ago, and they're all very sharp. Seems like they're exploiting a space that's wide open and waiting for innovation. I'm pretty excited to see where they go in the near future.
Why do people act so dismissive about what others achieve by comparing it (in a shallow manner I might add) to what other's have already done? Guess what, I've never used Kongregate and I've been addicted to games since I can remember. When it comes to potential addressable market, teh great internet is f---ing massive and users are not that loyal if a better solution comes along so who gives a damn. <Cue Facebook entrance>
In my humblest opinion a dismissive, thoughtless, knee-jerk comment more often than not suggests a reaction from a wantraprenuer. Exhibit B: TechCrunch comments. Whether it's fear, lack of confidence, or something else, they certainly don't realize - muchless value - execution, focus, and persistence.
So true and to make things worst, people that are busy building things don't get time to comment. Markets, incentives, life - go forth and conquer my lord (free forever). Last sentence was a joke.......
Sorry. I meant no offence. I just feel as if the news stories on this site should describe something novel, otherwise we'd have a thousand posts a day about people learning how to tie their shoes for the first time.
Kongregate's system is not distributed so it doesn't work whereever the SWF is. Also our system ties in to dual currency (points) and Facebook/ Twitter.
Yeah, they sorta missed the boat I think. They should have created a distributed system like Heyzap in addition to their portal site. They should really acquire Heyzap now though.
We looked at doing this at Kongregate - to us achievements are only meaningful in the context of a community, something you don't get with a distributed system. While the integration with Twitter and Facebook addresses this to some extent, I don't really think it gets at what achievements are all about. They're meaningful to a community of other people who play the game, not to everyone you know on the internet.
Another problem with this is that the other portals that the game would be distributed on are our competitors. They're not really going to take kindly to having our achievements on their site. And frankly, they're not going to want HeyZap's, either.
We are going to be opening up APIs for publishers get achievement data. We also already push users through our viral channels back to the publishers website (would do this automatically but flash doesn't allow it).
Most publishers we talk to love it. We want to open up this data and allow creative applications of achievements, both in the given community and in the wider social graph.
Kudos for the work, but personally I hate the recent crop of games with the social networking ties. I've tried out a few Zynga apps and every time it asks me to post something to my wall about their game, I feel like giving the app a big middle finger because I know what it's trying to do.
I don't mind achievements that award me for doing unique things in-game, but coercing me to tell other people about your game really drives me mad.
perhaps the next generation of game machines will be lightweight clients with games run on the server. I'm picturing XBOX designed for MMORPG's and similar.
OnLive (http://www.onlive.com/) is doing exactly that. My brother was looking into doing cloud gaming, but this company was so far ahead of him that he moved onto different ideas.
I would imagine they're stored on a server somewhere, like everything else that needs to be secure. But as tptacek says[1], there really is no way to secure flash games against score fraud,unless there is a way to replay the game server side, which is only feasible for games like Chess.
We've got integrity checking on all calls back to our server (eg. when unlocking achievements and buying items).
We can also ping a game developer provided secure callback URL to let them know when we have seen a purchase or an achievement.
It _is_ possible to hack the flash content while it is running to unlock the achievements etc on the client, but the vast majority of players (99.9%) don't do this, because:
a) it defeats the purpose of playing the game
b) it is hard
So in reality it isn't a problem for game developers or for us :)
Although I don't work directly with the Xbox LIVE security folks, I've got a friend or two over there. They work extremely hard to do the impossible: preserve the perceived value of achievements and leaderboard rankings in the face of an untrusted client. Being the talented folks that they are, they are surprisingly successful.
Let me tell you: if your service garners any success (and I wish you the best of luck!) you will encounter widespread cheating. For friends-only leaderboards or achievement lists, this may be an acceptable victim-less crime, but global leaderboards or stranger achievement comparisons will be a problem.
Xbox addresses this with "secure" hardware, but still faces significant cheating. Constant patrol is needed to fix the broken windows. Do not underestimate then desire of some individuals to ruin the fun for everyone. Just because you don't see why you would want to do it doesn't mean people won't.
