Facebook Instant Games – The state of play

[Music] [Music] hi everyone thanks for coming I know it's late so thank you for so sticking around my name is joy I'm a strategic partner manager based here in the London office at Facebook I'm on our game's partnerships team we work with developers all across aamir to integrate with our platforms and help them succeed and today I'm sharing the latest on instant games with you here's a clicker it works yes cool so before I dive right in fill in some games that only talked about that I wanted to take a step back and talk to you a bit about I'm the mission of gaming and Facebook I'm in general and that's the mission of our team and our adjacent our Jason sales teams and product teams and marketing teams and

that is really to build the world's community for people to play watch and share games we already have a massive community of players on our on our platforms we currently have more than 800 million people playing a Facebook connected game every month and so we're trying to give these people experiences wherever they are so we do that on mobile with our log-in and friend fighting tools we do that on desktop with our game room client and we also now do that very cross functionally and cross-platform with instant games and that's what we're gonna focus on so i've curiosity who here plays in some games okay that's a lot and who here let's say it has looked into instant games even if you're not like a passionate player but you know what I'm talking about pretty much everyone okay that's good so for those of you who don't know instant games is the latest addition to our to our gaming platforms and really is a way for people to play html5 games quickly and frictionlessly on messenger and on

Facebook so here's the subway video I'm John how that actually looks instant game pac-man [Music] take new pedes it is not even a well want to be my girlfriend yeah totally

with so many games people connected compete against your friends family anyone really play on players so I think that's the easier way of explaining to you what Indians is and how they work rather than me wiggling around here the beauty about instant games really is about friends playing together and about making that social and making instant games part of the experience and of the conversation that users have in Messenger threads so really the idea behind instant games came from the scale that we already have on our platforms we currently have more than 1.3 billion people on messenger every month and more than 2 billion people on Facebook and with that the amount of users that we can connect and engage through games and through you building very deep experiences on the platform is huge so I mentioned before that these are html5 games and the underlying technology of instant games is html5 we see web technology evolving

very fast we also see the ecosystem of developers around it evolving very fast and what that also means is that us developers can bring very deep and rich experiences to instant games by now what it also means is that you can deploy your instant game very easily across all platforms from Android to iOS to web have the same have the same game running and really engage players by connecting them through the game so it's been a year in November we celebrated the first birthday of instant games I'm standing here and saying that it's been a year is is impressive I'm looking back at it you hear us internally talking a lot about legacy SDKs and old features and looking back at everything that happened this year and what's still to come and that's we're gonna talk about is very exciting as I mentioned before instant games is rolled out globally to all to all users both in messenger and on Facebook we currently have more than 70 game titles live globally I think as of today actually were closer to 80 and we have users playing them all over the world

so here a couple of of games that we have seen come to the platform over the last over the last couple of years over the last year so we've seen classic arcade titles like Tetris being revisited for the platform we've seen completely new inventions like Golden Boot minority has come to the platform and they are all very different and we see very different games succeed on the platform Tetris for example everybody knows Tetris and has play Tetris on some sort of shape or form and Tetris is a single-player game on the platform but with a very dynamic leaderboard makes it very easy for users to engage and to play together to see who's better than you and who's not as good and who you want to challenge nor Dia's and golden boots and took a bit of a different stance they opted for a synchronous multiplayer game so really um it's a head-to-head battle in real-time against your friends you compete for a score in a 1-minute match and then lastly I want to call out battleship and built by cool games and which opted for an async game and really what they have done is thought a lot about how does the game enhance the

conversation and that is where turn-based becomes very interesting as as reminding players when it is their turn and when their friend made their turn really becomes a part of the of the messenger threat that you have and there's a lot of more games coming and together with our one year anniversary we announced a lot of new titles coming to the platform Sega Sega Sonic is currently being built so it's Disney symptom and can host puzzles & Dragons all of these games are really being revisited from the ground up with the with the new intention of making them work in a messenger and thread based gaming platform and so over the last year we've listened to lots we've listened a lot or beta partners who we've been working with very closely and really they have pushed us and focused us on what is most important to make this platform a success and this mainly evolved around these four pillars discovery virality reengagement a monetization which i think for most game developers make sense and also for us it makes sense that these are the most important pillars and that's what we're

gonna dive into a bit more so first off discovery it is obviously in the first step very important that users can actually easily discover the games just as easy as it is to start an instant game it needs to be very easy to actually find the instant camp and so over the last year we've introduced a lot of new discovery services and we've enhanced the ones that we already had and really took a deeper dive into how we can make them more effective so first up is our games tab for those of you don't know the games to have sits in the main messenger navigation there's a games icon you can click on and really the games tab is the one-stop shop for everything instant games from games that your we playing to suggested games to new releases and games you are playing with your friends all of it can be found in the games tab we also have game pages so I mentioned before that instant games live both in facebook and in messenger and that is where game pages become very important I assume that everybody knows the idea of a Facebook page in general and that is exactly what we were leveraging here

every instant game has a page connected to it and as a developer really think about this page as the home of your instant game and the place for you to build a community around your game so here's an example of every wingman every Wings official page at the very top of that page of either user land on it I see in instant games units I can tab on that unit and once I tap on it every wing opens up the game opens up I can play and I can from there share out the game to my friends and then next up is deep links and we introduced deep links very late last year mainly as a way for us developers to start finding audiences relevant to your instant games outside of our own platforms so outside of Facebook and outside of messenger you can take these deep links you can post them and you can share them wherever you think that it's relevant for users whatever wing does here is they embedded it on their on their website and this is the mobile landing page as I tap on that play Now button the deep link is embedded behind that messenger opens up every wing opens up and once again I'm in the middle of the experience and then

lastly but definitely not least are in thread updates I said before how messenger and instant games is all about enhancing conversations and the game really becoming part of a messenger thread and that's where in thread updates coming so what happens here is my friend Jason challenges me for a game of 8 ball pool on instant games the game automatically creates this in thread update which says joy Jason has Jason has challenged you for a match of 8 ball pool this becomes parts of our messenger conversation I can tab on it and find myself in the challenge that Jason here challenged me to so once again it's a very high intense surface and it really is extremely useful in that social context so an example I want to call out here is battleship from crew games like I said before they really thought about how they can enhance this and make this part of the conversation and in threat updates really are a very big discovery surface so new users join the platform mainly because because their friends

play because they see their friends play because their friends invite or challenge them or ask them for help and this is exactly what Koreans here is making use of with 47% of sessions being started from these in thread updates so it really is a very useful discovery surface and one that is very high intent and very social it's only been a year there's a lot more to come on discovery here's a bit of a sneak peek of what's about to come we are building a newsfeed ad units very similar to what you are used to from our mobile app install ad units and the user is going to see it or newsfeed can instantly tab on it the game opens up and from there on they can share it out that's gonna come in the next couple of months I mentioned before that the games tab is kind of the one-stop shop for everything instant games that also means that there are a lot of games on there and so we are working a lot on enhancing this ranking and this algorithm to really make it more personalized and there are two things feeding into this one is more game specific data how does the game perform how does it retain what does virality look like and also user specific data which game which games

that the user enjoy playing which games do their friends play to really factor that in and really make it more personalized and lastly we're also working on cross promotion between games we have a lot of developers who already have more than one game on the platform and really we want to allow us developers to leverage the audiences you have built in separate instant games and allow you to cross-promote those so that's that's a bit on discovery so there are various ways where how users can actually find instant games and then from there obviously it's all about virality and it's all about sharing that out the ease of sharing achievements and of nudging friends and of reminding friends and of challenging and collaborating with friends also means that the platform lends itself very nicely to creating virality amongst users over the last year we've worked a lot on giving developers more control of the in-game experiences the start and the end screen to really make sure that is sharing and inviting floor can very easily be embedded into any game so with virality

we have created a set of api's that we collectively call rich gameplay features we announced these at f8 last year and have enhanced them since a very big part of this is sharing Facebook games have always been social they have necessarily been social by policy they have been social because we always aim to make it very easy to create these social loops and so a big part of that is sharing what happens here I think the video already played but what happens here is I play every wing and I had a legendary egg and out comes the dragon cookie and with one tab I can very easily share that in messenger to a single friend or to a group of friends or I can share it on newsfeed to all of my friends which then lands on my profile so they can easily join in another very important part of this is inviting and challenging friends what happens here is I play every wing and as I play I achieve a new score and every wing prompts me to challenge a friend and to share that score this overlay pops up which is ranked by your most recent interactions with friends and your groups and then by

tapping on play here once again this in thread update is generated becoming part of the messenger of conversation so with virality we took a look at how the users retained when they play in the social context and would really see here is of users who enter a game on day 0 the ones that retain best are the ones that actually play with their friends so users who play an activated threads which means a thread where more than 2 people are active and playing or in one-to-one threads where each user plays back those users are two to three times more attentive than users who play solo we took a step even further down and looked at what how do users behave that play in more than one thread and with more than one friend so these users are up to five times more attentive than users who play solo or who play in a thread where their friend doesn't play back so really making sure that not only your game has these viral and social loops but that your game really makes

use of it in a very socially relevant way and that is really the core to to engaging more users and engaging them long-term so one thing one example that I wanted to call out as a book as a pupu from Miniclip for those of you who played it for pool on mobile as I assume a lot of you have and the instant game version really opted for turn-based gameplay between friends and what a pope who really focused on was their Lobby screen they made it very easy for a user to start more than one challenge against a friend and only one game player session so what you see here is the recommended friends I can very easily tab on it claim I first turn and really start start challenges with four or five six friends without ever actually leaving the game in one session alone and with that eight ball pool now sees more than 800,000 turns being played between players per day so the game can go so the game can go viral and social and and the next parts

of your serie engagement right how do we get the users back into the game and how do we make that as easy as possible and that's where BOTS come in the bots platform has been out there much longer than instant games and when we were looking at an easy way for users to for developers to find a channel where they can communicate at scale with their users it was pretty much a no-brainer to connect bots to it and the bots platform is very flexible which means it leaves you a lot of space for creativity and the way it works at the moment is that every instant game has a bot attached to it and this bot can proactively start messaging users after their first gameplay session so we are thinking about it a bit like push notifications on steroids and here are a couple of examples I want to call out the first one again is every wing and what every wing has opted for is a very interactive BOTS from their bot I can claim rewards and I can send my characters on new missions and really it's a very relevant bot in the sense of I don't actually

need to go into the game the bots actually gives me a very very useful interaction the next one is words with friends words with friends opted for a very social bot and what happens here is really the bot only messages me when another friend started playing words with friends who I have not previously played with so here my friend John starts playing Words With Friends but isn't playing with me the bot actually sends me a message about that and directly from the bottom start I can start a game with my friend John and lastly I said the boss performs very is very flexible and that's what basketball forever really exploited they have build a story based BOTS where I play I play basketball forever for the first time my score sucks because I just played for the first time and my personal coach starts reaching out to me and starts giving me missions so that I become better at the game one example I wanted to call out here to really show how important BOTS and really making making good use of boxes is loading so if you

haven't played for picks one word on the platform the bottles me in every single time there's the largest entry point for existing users back into the game so it really is an amazing channel to reach back out to your users and say hey come back there's actually something interesting going on so now that you can also reengage your loot your users I left the best for last which is monetization so out of curiosity who knows that we rolled out video ads on instant games okay that's not that many of you that's good so for those of you don't know we rolled out together with our one-year anniversary we rolled out video ads so video interstitials and rewarded video across instant games this is currently available globally for all users we are slowly expanding this to more and more of our beta partners and the great thing for scaling this is that we are making use of our own Facebook audience Network its demand and its control so that makes it very easy and yes we're also testing in-app purchases this is very early stage we are testing

this with one partner on Android at the moment as with everything we do on the platform we want to make sure that we understand how to best integrate this we understand how to make best make this work for users and developers before we roll this out further so there's more to come on that and then there's a bit on coming soon two minutes perfect so I said it's been a year there's a lot more coming so here's a bit of a sneak peek we just announced live game streaming from instant games users can now go live and stream their instant gameplay to their friends they can share this into groups and into feeds and into messenger and there's a very interactive way of getting more users in especially because there is a play now call to action on it for users to jump right into the game as they see the live stream we're also experimenting with real-time communication we know that almost 250 million users a month actually video call on messenger so it's a very high intent discovery surface for games we're currently testing this with words with friends where two people are actually

video calling the words with friends icon pops up and as they click on it they find themselves in a real-time match of words with friends and this is currently live in five countries not as shiny and fancy but also really important instant game analytics we are working on embedding more and or instant games specific data into Facebook analytics things like context session by type and context session by size to really help you understand how your game is performing and what you need to work on and we're also working more on on bot enhancements and really making bot reporting better and lastly for those who put their hand up and said they're playing instant games a lot you will have realized that all instant games are in portrait mode at the moment that's because there was no landscape so far we are now also making landscape mode available across all platforms and for all developers so if you want to build a landscape game you actually can this is a signup form for the beta it's not the most memorable link in the world so if anybody wants to take a picture feel free to looks like everybody kind

of there's still a couple of people taking a picture all right cool that's it for me thank you so much for listening I don't know if we still have time for questions we have time for one question cool are there any questions on instant games that I can answer yes [Music] yeah I think that's a great question so in general I mean the platform is still in beta and the platform is mainly sulamita because we're also where we're trying to understand and make sure that

everything is scalable and not spamming right and the so we have policies around pots and around the usage of pots if the user doesn't interact with the bot the bot can not message the user anymore we've also tried to make it very easy for users to actually disable BOTS when they don't want to get messaged by them at all so we have all these things in place that we're trying to really make it useful for users and also have developers think about these channels with caution and how they can best leverage them as they are very valuable but they also go directly into your messenger inbox yes great cool yeah great question so we it is it some pizza right now like I said mainly because there's still a lot of testing going on and because we also really want to make sure that we get the developer and user experience equation right once it goes out of theta the dream is that every developer can publish an instant game right and that's where our job on making discovery making discovery better

making what's not too spammy all of these things are then gonna fall to us as a platform [Music] [Music]