Longstanding online game portal Kongregate published a bevvy of interesting charts and graphs on its developer blog today to make the case that browser games built with HTML5 are just as viable and successful as those that rely on Flash or other browser plugins like the (now depreciated) Unity Web Player.
Kongregate’s public support of HTML5 isn’t new, of course; company chief Emily Greer stated earlier this year that based on what kinds of games devs were uploading to Kongregate, devs seemed to be quite fond of HTML5.
What is new is all the interesting data today’s blog post includes on how Flash, Unity Web Player, and HTML5 games have performed on Kongregate in the past decade.
For example, Kongregate reports that if you look at the games on the service built on either Flash, NPAPI browser plugins (like Unity Web Player) or HTML5, over 60 percent of “great” games (i.e., those that have a 4.0 rating or greater [out of 5] and at least 10,000 plays) are HTML5.
That’s roughly the same when you look at the company’s graphical breakdown of hosted game revenue (from in-app transactions); in 2011 Flash games generated basically 100 percent of revenue on Kongregate, but now it’s ~65 percent HTML5 games and ~45 percent Flash games, with just a smidge of plugin-based games.
“Kongregate is seeing minimal impact of game technology on the quality and revenue potential of games,” reads he blog post. “While future support is uncertain for Flash, we can now confidently say that regardless of what happens we have another equally-capable technology for 2D games.”
We’ve taken the liberty of excerpting a few choice graphs below, but you can find the rest (as well as more data and analysis) in the full Kongregate blog post.
