Apart from watching live videos of celebrities, posting pictures, ranting about your work life, do users you need one more thing to do on Facebook’s vast platform? It looks like Facebook has answered your prayers and decided to integrate video games into its mobile platforms.
In Facebook’s main mobile app and Messenger app, the users can
access these Instant Games from News Feed and within
conversations. Facebook hopes to bring some friendly competition in form of new
Instant Games like Pac-Man, Words With Friends Frenzy, and Space Invaders.
As these games are built on the HTML5 mobile web standard, the users don’t need
to download and install them on their mobile phones. Instead, they load within
seconds and the users can start playing.
Facebook Instant Games have been initially launched in 30 countries for Android
5.0 or later and iOS 8.0 or later. The 30 countries are — Norway,
Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden, Great Britain, Canada, United States, Japan,
Netherlands, Australia, Austria, Latvia, Germany, Ireland, Belgium, New
Zealand, France, Singapore, Finland, Hong Kong, Russian Federation, Estonia,
Taiwan, Slovenia, Puerto Rico, Cyprus, Israel, Lithuania, Spain, and Italy.
Apart from the games from classic developers like Konami, Taito,
and Namco, titles from the new developers like King and Zynga too have been
included. It looks like, eventually, Facebook will make money from Instant
Games by charging developers for promoting games and getting a portion of
purchases. However, currently, there are no in-game purchases.
Facebook’s latest foray into gaming reminds me of company’s past
dominance in desktop social gaming around 2008-2010 when it gathered tons of
money. With a shift to the mobile platform, this money-making machine of
Facebook has churned out these HTML5-based games with better graphics and
gameplay.
Facebook has been already testing the gaming potential in
Messenger. In the past, we’ve come across Messenger games like Basketball, which was play over 1.2
billion times, and Soccer. The new Instant Games endeavor
is just an expansion of those little efforts.
Before the launch of Instant Games, recently, Facebook also
unveiled Gameroom a downloadable desktop app that
feels like a casual competition to Steam.
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