Game Jolt is a hosting servicefor free and commercial video games with social functions. Co-founded by Yaprak and David DeCarmine, the initial site launched on January 1, 2004, and was created by David DeCarmine.
History
2003–2007
Development of Game Jolt started in 2002 as holo-world, which then was renamed to Game Jolt in 2003. The site publicly launched on July 29, 2004 and included a public account system, forums, a chatroom and games, uploaded with the respective creators' permission. In 2007 the site was taken down due to inactivity.
2008–present
In December 2008, David launched a second version of the site with Game Jolt becoming a game portal. The site was completely redesigned and introduced an automated uploading system for downloadable games, as well as Flash, Unity and Java games. Ad revenue sharing was publicly released in September 2009 from its closed beta, which gave users a 30% share on advertising revenue on their game pages, profiles and blog posts. The site had much automated spam from mid-2011 to early 2012, which resulted in inactivity of the community as well as its owner. The [|Game Jolt API] came out of its three-year beta in July 2012 allowing games to integrate with the site. Game Jolt started accepting browser-based HTML5 games for upload in February 2013. David DeCarmine announced on August 8 that he was working full-time on Game Jolt's development, leaving his job at Zulily in the process. Indie Statik, a now defunct indie games-related news aggregator and blog, announced it was 'partnering' with Game Jolt in October 2013. This brought an article stream on the front page and articles of Game Jolt hosted games show up on the said game's profile, with a game portal congregated by Indie Statik and served by Game Jolt planned but never came to fruition. Game Jolt Jams released in early 2014 as a service to allow users to create their own game jams that integrated with the main site. A beta for a new site overhaul was made public in June 2015 and was released later that month, with Game Jolt advertising a responsive design, automated curation for both games and game news articles which weighs how recent a game was uploaded and how popular it is and filtering options on game listings for platform, maturity rating and development status. In January 2016, Game Jolt released source code of the client and site's frontend on GitHub under MIT license. An online marketplace was announced in April 2016 and released the following month in May, allowing developers to sell their games on the site.
Let's Player partnerships
In November 2014 Game Jolt announced the "Indies vs PewDiePie" game jam, partnering with the popular Youtuber Felix "PewDiePie" Kjellberg. Developers were given a weekend to create a game with the theme of "fun to play, fun to watch" to suit the Let's Plays entertainment style. Users could rate entries afterwards until December 1 when the scores were counted up. The prize to the top 10 rated games was Felix playing the games on his channel as a means of promotion for the developers, although later he played other entries. Game Jolt partnered with Felix, Sean "Jacksepticeye" McLoughlin and Mark "Markiplier" Fischbach to host "Indies vs Gamers" in July 2015. The requirements for entries were arcade games using the [|GJAPI] highscore tables, to be made between the July 17–20 and the top 5 games were played on the partner's YouTube channels.
Game Jolt has hosted numerous official game development contests with varying requirements and rewards. "Contests" are differentiated from "Jams". A contest on Game Jolt refers to a competition wherein developers have a single theme their game must follow if they enter the competition, and an ordered subjective top games selection is found either from judging by the staff or, with the two recent Indies VSs competitions, community voting. A jam however has no requirements and only an optional theme, which may or may not be judged but with no prizes for the winners.
Contests
Jams
Jams are hosted on the weekend. Unlike the contests there is no theme- just work on new games or WIPs. Developers are encouraged to livestream, post screenshots and tweet about whatever they're developing, with no winners are produced at the end.
