Instant Games — is it game over?
The tl;dr for this one is very short: No. However do keep reading if you want to know what is the current state of the chat gaming sector.
I’m writing this post because I’ve gotten so many questions that go like this: “What are you doing now that instant games are gone?”. The question comes because of the announcement that Facebook made in the summer that they are migrating instant games from Messenger to Facebook and Facebook gaming tab. So in fact the instant games are not disappearing anywhere, but they are moving: the discovery tab in the Messenger app will no longer display game links, but they will be shown in the gaming tab in the main Facebook app. Also you can still share links in the Messenger too, but just may be directed to Facebook to play.
However most of the news headers didn’t talk about moving or migrating so if you didn’t read the article it was easy to miss that point: e.g. Facebook pulls instant games from Messenger, Facebook’s instant games are leaving Messenger. From these headers it’s easy to get an idea that it’s all game over.
From a developer point-of-view this move has been possible to predict already for a long time. The chat as a platform is overall so new and fresh that you need to work based on what you see in the next 6-months horizon: What game design elements will work on the platform as it’s going to be, not as it is now. If it takes you more than two months to make a game chances are you are going to miss the sweet spot if you don’t work on your predictions.
Technically there isn’t much that changes and that we’d need to adapt to. Instant Games have been appearing in the main Facebook app already for a long time and nothing breaks as such from this move. Every once in a while new additions come to the APIs that we can use for the games and I expect new features will come along in the Facebook side. The old player-vs-player and other messaging centered APIs still work too, even if evolving as we go.
What comes to the business side and the union of discovery-retention-monetization: This move can actually benefit the funnel by improving the discovery. Good discovery on this platform also helps the retention as the two variables are more linked to each other here than in the traditional app-store centered game business. When the user easily finds the games he/she can also find them again to come back to them.
So overall we are happy on how the platform moves. There are challenges to keep up when the goal posts keep moving, but that has been the case all the time for the past two years and I expect them to keep moving until perhaps the time when we developers “break the bank” and create the content that starts to define this platform. This recent move is not more radical for us than other ongoing development. We are all in this together: platform owners and developers, defining what this medium can be and what it should be.
All that being said and we being happy to develop for Facebook we also can’t forget the others chat platforms out there: VKontakte, WeChat, Line, Viber, Snapchat, Kakao and others. The chat as a platform keeps growing to many directions. This social HTML5-webview based sector is hungry for innovative and engaging gameplay.
