Right now, users can access 17 different games, ranging from old school cult faves like Pac-Man and Space Invaders to newer games like Words With Friends: Frenzy. On Tuesday, Facebook unveiled a new initiative called Facebook Instant Games, an HTML5 gaming platform to play games on Messenger and in the Facebook News Feed on the Web and on mobile. What sort of games, you ask?
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All you need to do to challenge a friend to a game is start a conversation by clicking on the name of your friend or pressing the plus ‘+’ icon. It was a tentative step that got 1.2 billion plays in just three months.
After Facebook Messenger’s success with the simple basketball game, they are launching Instant Games with game titles like PacMan and Space Invader on the list. When you’re done, the people in your conversation will see your score and have the chance to try to beat it. However, the new tab on Facebook Messenger is reportedly aimed at offering a wider variety of games for Facebook users to enjoy. This meant that a user can start playing games by chatting to a gaming bot. At the moment, there are around 17 games available to Messenger users across 30 countries and you can bet more titles will be added soon.
Facebook launched numerous instant games for the Messenger application on November 29, 2016.
The most obvious benefit to hosting your game on Facebook is reach.
The social media giant separated Messanger from its Facebook app and created a standalone one which was seen as a cynical move.
Facebook lost itself to the fast-pacing gaming world.
Instant Games will allow users to invite others and share results and scores, but has controls to prevent people from getting overwhelmed with requests to play. And once developers get their games into the hands of players through the App Store, they can cross-promote to their other games. There are no ads on the service and in-game purchases are now disabled. In October this year, one of the major rivals of Messenger, Telegram introduced games that were powered by bots.
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Put simply: Any developer putting their game inside of Facebook won’t make any money from those users.
