Update: It also seems that Kongregate has made a number of layoffs in addition to halting its submissions process.
In a statement the company provided to Forbes, it said that it had made a number of staff go. On social media, many employees say they had been let go with no warning.
"We can confirm that we have made the difficult, but necessary decision to let a number of appreciated team members go today," Kongregate wrote.
"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 organisation.
"To be more specific, we're focused on our internal game development and acquisitions rather than our legacy flash gaming platform. As we outlined on our website, all of the current games on Kongregate.com will remain playable, we are just not allowing any new games to be uploaded at this time.
"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."
Original story: Web games portal Kongregate is no longer allowing new titles to be submitted to the site.
In an official forum post, the company revealed that as of yesterday (Wednesday, July 1st), the platform would not be accepting new games. Since it launched back in 2006, Kongregate has become home to more than 128,000 games.
This is due to the Flash technology, which a large portion of Kongregate's titles were made with, is being slowly wound down.
Furthermore, the firm is disabling some of Kongregate's social features, such as many chat rooms – save for around 20 associated with particular games – as well as its non-gaming forums.
"During the intervening years, Kongregate as a company has grown and adjusted with those industry-wide changes. Today our business is largely focused on developing games and flash, as you are aware, is slowly going away. That means that Kongregate.com will need to evolve as well," the post read.
"We will be rolling out several changes to the website over the coming days and months, the first of which is that we will no longer be accepting new titles on Kongregate.com as of today. We also will not be adding any more badges to games. You will still be able to play our existing library of over 128,000 amazing games and developers will be able to update their games as normal.
"In addition, we will be disabling a number of Kongregate.com’s social features later this month and in the future. We know that this change will be frustrating to many of you, but we wanted to give you a chance to plan for it, so you don’t lose contact with the many friends you’ve made on Kongregate.com over the years."
Kongregate launched a brand new storefront for PC games called Kartridge back in 2018, though the company told PCGamesInsider.biz at the time that this wasn't intended to be a competitor to Steam.
The company bought two game developers in 2019; RPG Bit Heroes and Surviv.io.
