Kongregate Contest Offering $25K To Promote Unity Game Support

Web-game portal Kongregate has announced a contest that will distribute a prize pool of $25,000 to developers who publish games made with the newly-supported Unity3D engine to the service. Games created for the Unity Game Contest will be ranked on a five-star scale by Kongregate users through February 15, 2011. The entries with the 25 highest average ratings will then move on to the finals round, where "a panel of qualified judges" will select ten winners on the basis of creativity, innovation, enjoyability and use of Unity technology. The top entry will receive $10,000, with second and third place developers receiving $5,000 and $3,000, respectively. The remainder of the top ten finishers will receive $1,000 each. The event promotes Kongregate's recently added support for games made with the Unity 3D game development tool, which is already used by more than 250,000 registered developers. Kongregate formerly only supported games made for Adobe's Flash platform. The browser-based Unity Web player has been installed 35 million times as of October, according to Unity, and the engine also supports development on Wii, PS3, Xbox 360, iOS and Android platforms. The newest version of the development tool, Unity 3.0, added over 100 new features including performance enhancements for the player's hardware assisted 3D support. In September, EA signed a multi-year contract to use Unity development tools throughout the company. Brick-and-mortar retailer Gamestop purchased Kongregate in July as part of its effort to tap into more purely digital revenue streams.