Facebook Instant Games: Designing Games for Chat

Key insights

5 slides

Platform scale

Facebook Instant Games supports a large player base.

Top titles on the platform reach between 3 million and 10 million players. The platform is a standalone business, not a user acquisition channel for external mobile games.

Engagement strategy

Effective engagement integrates games into existing conversations.

This involves providing clear calls to action that keep the game relevant within the chat interface. Games should function as standalone products.

Like a board game brought out during a family gathering, the game becomes part of the ongoing social interaction.

Engagement key. Effective engagement requires integrating games into existing group or one-on-one conversations, providing clear calls to action that keep the game relevant within the chat interface.

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Summary

Facebook Instant Games on Messenger is presented as a distinct platform requiring a fundamental shift in game design, comparable to the move to mobile in 2010-2011, rather than a simple port or marketing channel. Written in March 2018 by the CPO and co-founder of Chatterbox Games, drawing on a year of developing for Instant Games and iMessage, the analysis argues that mobile best practices largely fail in a chat context, and that direct ports have mostly flopped, with Cut the Rope and Adventure Capitalist as notable exceptions.

The platform shows strong momentum. Messenger reached more than 1.3 billion monthly users in late 2017, the top 10 games drew between 3M and 10M players, and Snake Mania added 2.2M players in seven days in February 2018. Still, the market is volatile: earlier hits such as Galaga, Space Invaders and PAC-Man have faded, while Snake Mania and Cookie Crush have risen. Developers should not treat Messenger as a user acquisition channel, since Facebook aims to boost engagement inside Messenger. Branding plays, like Nordeus's Golden Boot and ZeptoLab's Cut the Rope Instant, can work, but revenue-generating standalone games are preferable.

Retention is the central challenge. With no install, home screen icon or push notifications, retention resembles Facebook Canvas more than native mobile. It must come from social interaction, supported by social contexts (game prompts in one-on-one and group chats) and a bot channel, which Facebook restricts to prevent spam. Early social mechanics, such as gifting lives and honor points, are described as unsustainable. Group raids, as seen in Quest Friends and Everwing, are the strongest approach, though they suit RPG-like reward depth. Turn-based play hurts retention when players wait on friends, working only for early entrants like 8 Ball Pool and Words with Friends. Stranger matchmaking, used by Golden Boot and Snake Mania, drives growth but dilutes the platform's distinctiveness.

The author recommends designing for a useful bot and varied social contexts, avoiding pacing players through friends' actions, and focusing on friend-based social play as discoverability tightens and competition grows.