The web game portal Kongregate has announced in a forum post several sweeping changes to the site. As of the first of this month, they are no longer taking submissions for new games to add to their library.
They are no longer allowing new badges to be added to games, though updates to existing games are still allowed. And going forward, they will be shutting down a large number of social features on the site, such as various chat rooms and forum sections. The forum sections will either be outright removed or merely restricted to read-only mode.
On top of this, Kongregate also laid off a number of its staff. Unfortunately, the affected team appeared to have been informed in the worst way possible: via their direct deposit notifications. They released a statement to Forbes regarding the layoffs.
We can confirm that we have made the difficult, but necessary decision to let a number of appreciated team members go today. Over the last few years, we have been transitioning our focus to better align with our strengths and the gaming industry as a whole. This year has been especially difficult for us, and the rest of the world, with COVID 19 affecting our business in a negative way and changing the overall games market. That’s why we had to take this unfortunate step to reshape our organization.
In regards to how employees were told, a lot of care went into how we planned on informing our team given the current constraints, including a group meeting earlier today. Unfortunately, this involves a lot of moving parts, and in this case, the direct deposit notification got ahead of us. This is not how we intended our employees to find out and for that we are very sorry.
Where Kongregate goes from here as a publisher and developer are anybody’s guess.
