Continuing to address some of the questions/concerns brought up by developers over the last week at Flash Gaming Summit and Game Developer Conference. Email me at robin [at] candystand.com with additional ideas if you’d like!
Unlike many of the other popular game portals out there, Candystand doesn’t feature game uploads for developer. You can’t directly submit a game and have it appear at http://www.candystand.com/play/[Your Game].
In some ways, this limits us from being able to compete with the likes of Kongregate, Newgrounds and others. They’re able to support a theoretically limitless catalog of flash games because each one is submitted directly by the developer him/herself. They also have somewhat of an advantage from a search engine standpoint – tons of user-generated pages mean many more URLs that search engines can crawl. In addition, the efforts of those who run the front-end of these sites leans much closer towards deciding which games actually get featured on the front page for promotion, and so on.
In contrast, Candystand hand-picks every single game that makes it onto the site. While that means volume-wise, we have far fewer games than some of our counterparts, it also means we can pay much closer attention to the quality of these games and make sure they fit with what (we believe) our audience wants to play. Handpicking games as exclusives, primaries or sitelocks (see previous post for clarification on terminology) lets us attempt to make a better user experience for gamers on Candystand.
Most importantly, curating games in this fashion means that 90% of the time (as much as possible, basically), developers will integrate their game with our High Score API, which lets users post scores to the leaderboard, earn bronze/silver/gold trophies for achieving certain high scores and earn tickets for playing. The ability to earn tickets, in turn, fuels our prizes/sweepstakes economy.
The result is that we pretty meticulously choose which developer we work with on which games. For our part, we think it offers a great way for developers to get more engaged players (if they have incentives like trophies and tickets), but also means they usually have to commit more effort and time to integrate and QA their game.
So which games do we actually put on the site?
Innovative but accessible. We’re always interested in sponsoring games that push the boundaries of what flash games are, but still manage to remain accessible to our largely very (very) casual crowd. Examples of games that fall into this category are Electric Box (thinking man’s puzzle/physics game) and BigTree Defense (tower defense with branching fractal-style weapon arrangement).
Trend followers. We also aim to have a catalog with games that fall into popular genres — time management, popping games, match three, spot-the-difference. Not only do we lessen the risk that a game will be a flop on our site, but it allows us to be competitive by offering similar types of games that audiences might find on another portal. Examples: Legend of the Golden Mask (hidden object), Momma’s Diner (time management).
Classics. Last but not least, Candystand specializes in games centered around cards, pool, racing, sports and other types of ‘traditional’ games that have existed outside of the flash game world. We’re known for our classic mini golf and billiards titles, and car-based games always do well with our crowd. Ways to expand this part of our catalog are always welcome — even recent smaller pickups like Super Parking World are doing extremely well.
) — totally makes our day to know our users are happy! 
We just relaunched six solitaire games and Bloxie with yummy new Trident skinning (they’ve just come onboard as a new sponsor for us). Same gameplay, new look. Check them out here!
