New site aims to be the YouTube of gaming

By Lisa Baertlein

LOS ANGELES, March 22 (Reuters Life!) - When video game maker Jim Greer approached Silicon Valley investors to give him nearly $1 million for his start-up. he had an irresistible pitch: "It's video games meets YouTube."

He named the site Kongregate.com and last June began inviting game developers and players to test it. After Christmas he opened the site to users of all stripes, who can submit and play games free of charge.

So far, the advertising-supported site at www.kongregate.com offers 300 games that are rated by players, who chat online as they play.

"Not all of them are gems, but the top 100 are," said Greer, 36, who founded the company with his younger sister Emily, 32, and offers game makers a share of the site's advertising revenue.

Reid Hoffman, founder of business networking site LinkedIn and a former PayPal executive, said timing played a big role in his decision to become an investor in the company.

Adobe Systems Inc.'s Flash software, which is used to make those Web ads that wiggle and shake, has made it easy for developers to quickly churn out fun games. At the same time, advances in Web technology have spurred all kinds of new ways to rate and share information online.

"If you get thousands of people creating content, really interesting things emerge," said Hoffman, an occasional gamer who said that while 70 percent of amateur games tend to be stinkers, about 10 percent are great.

Greer, 36, is not new to the $30 billion global business.