Have you been keeping track of the online web-based gaming industry? Web-based gaming means there are no downloads, often the games are flash based, and can be a real time sink, any tower defense, bubble, or that addictive quadradius game.

In particular, there are few platforms that are springing up that lets users create games, upload them and share with others. I saw a demo of Kongregate, I wrote up my review at while at Microsoft at Silicon Valley Launch.

Yahoo Games
This is the baseline of how we know web based gaming platforms, many of these games are yahoo created of by third parties. I remember playing chess on this when it first started to take wind.

Kongregate
If I had to invest my money in one company it would be this one. They provide a user geneated games community, games are created by the community, and users are rewarded. There’s quite a few other hooks and nice features that encourage user interaction and community. One of the lead investors is Reid Hoffman, in a market space of over 2 million in 2005. Most impressive, the average web session length is 40 minutes, users are clicking, chatting, and typing away –highly engaged.

Pogo
Is a platform of games, where there’s advertising opportunities and chance to win prizes. Somehow this resembles online casinos, the concepts are very similar. What makes these games so special? Their low barriers to entry, sometimes logins aren’t even required, their fast, and easy to play. Instant gratification.

Miniclip
Inside Miniclip you can see a variety of games, all for the time limited user. Note the promotion of Club Penguin, a game I was covering and experimenting before they started to explode. In fact, I still get a lot of traffic for the terms “club penguin review” from Google searches.

WildTangent Network
“WildTangent has also signed publishing agreements with a network of third party casual game developers such as PopCap, Funkitron, Playfirst, and Atari. Our catalogue spans all genres and consists of more than 250 1st and 3rd party games.”

From Interactive to User to User
Some of these games are a form of computer to user interaction but games like Quadradius are actually player to player, which completely changes the dynamics of the game. There’s all kinds of cross-branding opportunities for games to be used in a variety of unique ways. New opportunities to build experiences open up for the web strategist. Don’t know the difference between interactive marketing and social marketing, here’s a helpful guide.