damn, you were 1 min faster than me, bastard 
The first big domino to fall, kongerate is rated 1,200 on alexa (so that means lots of traffic), and since they are not filtering the “good games” that has got to push the plugin penetration rate through the roof (hopefully).
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/kongregate.com#
Wow this is amazing news, pretty soon most of flash gamer will have unity plugin installed.
Thats simply sick…
Fantastic news! Glad to hear Kongregate has jumped on the Unity bandwagon! The contest is a great way to kick it off too!
Can’t wait to dig into Kong’s API.
My game Langman is now on Kongregate.
I’ll gladly answer questions about the integration process if anyone needs help.
Ehren
This is all good and well, but I am interested in monetization on Kongregate and how it goes for Unity users.
This is great news.
but how come i need to install manually restart browser for unity web player ?
I thought unity plugin used to be one click install without any browser restart.
We’re glad to hear that the Unity community is excited about this new development. Unity3D has partnered with us to make this contest happen and to help us make sure we had a solid integration with their platform. We’re really looking forward to seeing what kind of great entries you guys come up with.
To answer a specific question:
“This is all good and well, but I am interested in monetization on Kongregate and how it goes for Unity users.”
We work on an ad revenue sharing program with all of our games, both Unity and Flash. You get a default 25% share of ad revenue generated by your game (measured based on gameplays), which increases to 35% if you implement our API (which is required for entering the contest). While the actual value of this changes every day based on markets and promotions, at the 35% rate we’re generally in the $1.00 to $2.00 range per thousand gameplays. We pay out when you hit a minimum threshold across all of your games (which is $25 for PayPal, $100 for checks, or $1000 for wires, your choice).
This is of course in addition to the contest earnings you can win. As far as I know you will also be eligible for the weekly/monthly contests, though I’m not 100% sure on that portion yet so I don’t want to make promises.
In any case, gest of luck to everyone who enters the contest!
So the idea is to make a game that people will come back to frequently to up the gameplays.
Alternatively come up with a snappy game like haiku hero and get reviewed on a popular website to draw in the players.
spinaljack - Unity is still very new to the major portal world. As far as I know, Kongregate is the first full-scale portal to really pick it up. A few tips that Flash developers have learned over time: always provide a mute button, allow the user to quit back out to the main menu (a lot of Unity games don’t seem to do this), and provide in-game instructions/tutorials.
Anyway, I think there is still a bit of speculation about how monetization will work with Unity, though I imagine in the long run it will be similar to Flash. In general, you always just want to make the best game possible. Having players keep coming back is fine, but I think high-end content and quality of gameplay, leading to viral spreading through friends, is the best way to go. Typically for Flash games you have a few types of monetization.
Ad revenue is one of them, though often not the biggest (especially because few portals offer the type and scale of revenue sharing that Kongregate does). MochiAds is a cool tool that Flash devs use to embed ads in their game on portals that don’t have ad revenue sharing, and this can help increase revenue for the game.
However, sponsorships tend to be the main goal. This is where sponsors (usually Flash portals) pay you to put their logo on the public version of the game. This leads to click-backs to the sponsor’s site, so it’s good advertising for them and justifies the purchase. Sponsorships usually run anywhere from $100 to $10,000, with a few top-of-the-line games landing sponsorships in the $20,000 - $30,000 range. These likely won’t be as big for Unity until more portals open up to accept Unity, though hopefully that’ll start happening once they see how great it is on Kongregate. You can also sell site-locked, non-exclusive sponsorships, but that gets a little more complicated. FlashGameLicense.com has a nice explanation of a lot of these points. And of course there is microtransactions, which is still going through some growing pains but has had significant success for a few games.
What exactly does “measured based on gameplays” mean? Every time the game is loaded by a user?
played around with their demo app a bit, and couldn’t get this to happen in the version hosted on unity3d.com: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeWp3UAxiTo
does anyone know - is there size restriction for submitions?
ya it seems like a 20 meg max, I hope they will raise it for us unity guys because its just too small for the big boys (IE interstellar marines – probably).
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Gameplays is defined as pageloads. Please note that we do check for reload-fraud though, so botting/fake reloads will be caught and forfeit earnings.
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The dimensions are limited to 800x600 roughly. The file size is limited to 20mb. In both cases, if you have a game that breaks those limits, send an email to developer_support@kongregate.com and let me know and in most cases I’ll up the limit for you, though within reason.
Well, a "gameplays’ for Unity is a single page load, once the control loads, all subsequent levels are loaded in the current control, so in reality, the person playing the game will never reload the page unless their browser cache gets nuked, that said, the “hit” on the page will always be the first load when they go to play the game.
So next question, does the game package have to be hosted on kongerate? Lets say I have an RPG game that in truth is around 500 megs in size do to many factors, like sound, graphics, etc, (my sound system is over a gig as it is), so I host my own game on my own web server instead of Kongerate and build a page on kongerate that loads the game from my server? Or does the game physically have to be uploaded to Kongerate? (as in I can totally strip all music out, all sound effects down to bare minimum but will be still over 50 megs for sure)
We measure the page loads - it doesn’t matter if it’s Unity, Flash, or an iframe game - we still count them the same. We’re measuring the page loading, not the game being loaded into the cache. We’ve been doing this for years, it works pretty well.
We do not have to host the entire package. You’re absolutely welcome to stream data in from an external source. I’m not sure how it will work in terms of crossdomain permissions, but assuming that can be worked out it shouldn’t be a problem. For the contest we will probably need to have a .unity3d file to start the process off. However, we will still “build the page” - it’s only data within the game that you would be hosting externally. The game still needs to fit within the game space on our pages. If the game is 50 megs and we can’t figure out another solution, I can up the maximum file size for you. 500 megs might be too much, but send me an email at developer_support@kongregate.com and I’ll look at your case in particular.