Facebook on Instant Games

[Music] very excited to be here it's my third maybe visit to Pocket Gamer in Helsinki I've been to most the Pocket Gamer events in London as well so I leave the games partnership team out of out of London for amia and I've been working at Facebook for five years now so we've seen a lot of change and in that time and this I think particularly when we look at instigated hyper casual this is one of the areas where there is the most innovation happening so we're really excited to be part of the process and I think it's still early in the journey but there's a lot of things that have happened so far I think you're gonna hear a lot of exciting things from other speakers as well I'm thrilled to see some of our close partners in the room is joining us for this who joined us for the adventure so far so when you think about Facebook kami as I mentioned we've been in the games business for a while

we're in a lot of other businesses but we do we do have a lot of activities and games we have over 800 million people who play games on on or connected to Facebook every month so from mobile through the PC console obviously through distant games increasingly as you saw in the video at the beginning we're also investing a lot of the things beyond traditional kind of gaming platform activities we're investing a lot in creators and influencers in streaming and really building out active communities for all types of gaming across Facebook so today I'll be talking about instant games but when you think about the different types of game through building there are also lots of different ways to interact with the the gaming community through Facebook and through the the tools we provide so I have to throw the number out there but you know Facebook is a very big community a very global community we have over 2 billion people every month using Facebook about 1.3 billion people using messenger so we really have big global communities when you're thinking about you know where you build your

games how you build your games how you build communities around your games there's a lot of people using different Facebook products so when we think about instant games you know where we're coming from and we've we've thought about this a lot and we've been you know really how do we eat how do we play a role how do we bring something new to the world of mobile gaming because obviously it's an enormous business and a successful business now what we're really looking at is when we think of the mission for instant games it's discovering playing game so what you know we're trying to help you as developers create and how people find and you know really find great games so discover games discover games they can play sorry they were supposed to be more to that slide the other point of this slide is really just this social connection really play with your friends and when you think of its names in particular for those who've been involved or building games to the platform all the games are html5 so they run across web both mobile platforms so really you can build a game once and you

can interact with with those games across any platform anywhere we have over 4,000 games live now more and more games come into the platform if I'm being brutally honest we maybe had too many games coming the platform or try to make sure we we have a bit more of a managed process as as new games become available and of course it's available globally I think that's one of the one of the things were we're most optimistic about and we've seen the most interesting trends around is just because this the game audience reflects Facebook you have enormous gaming markets everywhere from Southeast Asia to Latin to Western Europe to of course North America so you can really start to see different games work in different markets and the opportunity to really find players pretty much anywhere except China going back to you know how this sort of thing started it's like a lot of things at Facebook it was an iterative or organic process way back in March 2016 an engineer on messenger decided they would kind of they were looking differently they could do to to build

engagement and they built this little basketball almost Easter Egg you would find with an emoji that went so well that we actually really started investing in the platform we were first rolled out very early beta almost two years ago in October 2016 with like 29 games all very simple high-score games we we saw great results but we wanted to make it a more powerful more flexible platform so in May in 2017 we basically adapted the platform so it was more flexible gave you the developer more more tools and more flexibility we introduced bots we brought monetization to the table end of last year which of course is an important thing very important thing and then in March of this year we open the platform so anyone building a game could publish the platform subject to app review and now you know we're coming up on two years and I'll talk a little bit more about some of things we're doing to try to help grow the platform it's still early we're still frankly learning a lot

we're learning a lot from you the different developers in the room and you know in the community globally because this is you know it's a new space there's new interactions and so you know we love the feedback we get and we're continuing iterate quickly as you'll see so already we've seen a you know broad range you know there's 4,000 games you'll see every type of game some some games you wouldn't expect some games you know big small we still have some very simple very successful games we have some big IP Disney's tsumtsum is now on the platform and you see again you know single player progression game with social works well you see trivia crack you see Angry Birds from Finland zone Rovio and this is a really great story because it's effectively it's a completely reimagined version of the game with turn-based mechanic which really suits the the mesh inner environment so again we're seeing really an ever-increasing range of games and never increasing breadth of games that are optimized and built for the platform

so when you think about instant games and you think about messaging games in general you know there's some really unique aspects that are important to take into account and this is really what starts differentiate the games from some of the other experiences you might find is you really have this this deep social interaction you are playing in MSN or thread with your friend a group of friends your family and the interactions that can happen there and the real strong social connections are or what really set these these games apart and what sets the platform apart you can ask your friend for help you can play turn-based and this is again one of the earliest use cases we saw work where do the friends came to the platform very early we've seen a broad range of other games in this and it kind of makes sense you're already talking to people the game becomes a part of your conversation and then kind of more traditional things like sharing achievements invites challenges all that sort of stuff works in this in the same social context I meant I mentioned messenger BOTS again this is really if you think of push

notifications this is your way as a developer to re-engage with players the nice thing with BOTS is there's much more flexibility much more richness and in boss you can really do a bunch of things you can do simple updates you can say hey new levels your friends challenged you you can also build narratives and stories the basketball forever has built the whole story around what is a very simple basketball high-score game you can you can really can do a broad range of things with BOTS and so we're just starting to see people really push the envelope but that's one of the again one of the things that we we think is unique and exciting about the platform so far so I want to touch on the three big aspects we think about starting with growth really and all the tools we're building to help you the developer community be successful also talk about monetization and then I'll touch on tools and different ways that you can reengage and connect with your player base so when we think of a growth you know we're really investing in discovery this is one of the things that

frankly in some ways is a challenge because we are living within messanger we have certain constraints due to that but you know we also think there's some big opportunities so we're looking at different ways we can optimize organic discovery we're also working viral discovery which is a lot of what I just touched on in terms of making those connections and connecting your friends and playing with friends and then of course paid discovery so really finding those high-value users so we're this is one of the areas we've invested in a lot and for as we go forward or continue to invest even more in so in terms of organic discovery you look at the different the different channels messenger is has been the primary interface if you think of the games list within messenger that's where most people have found your games most people have reengaged with your games this is obviously continuing to evolve we're investing a lot of making this the better experience because it is space constrained threads so this is a you know essentially if you're in a conversation that's what we call a thread great way for you to have the send invites find new people to play with people you're already in a conversation with you can help them find a game Facebook is one of

the areas in this half in particular we're spending a lot of time to think about how do we take advantage those two billion people how do we make it easier for people to find the games technically you've been able to play them forever but making it actually easier to discover an easier find a game again is a big priority for us and search for those who've been watching we've made a lot of progress in search actually within messenger even the last month or two we've done a bunch of work on localizing and a bunch of different aspects so that's getting a lot better too is another way to define games sorry the fonts got a little crazy so when we think about discovery and you know what we're really starting to apply in the in a messenger list as well because you can see it's a relatively short list we're doing a lot of work with machine learning so really starting to bring algorithms to play so high quality games get found more easily we're taking to account the performance of the games themselves the personalized results so based on your profile your friends who you interact with so again this is one

of the other big priorities so we're starting to make some real progress on making sure that the right game gets surfaced to the right person and then viral discovery I touched on this already but you know there's a bunch of different ways that games can be viral we've initially in the first year or so focus really on that thread that messenger conversation which is the obvious in first place that these games you know you would find games interact around these games what we're doing now is really trying to think about all the different surfaces where people can interact within another on Facebook so Facebook itself again has been a channel that we've really been working on optimizing surfacing bookmarks really trying to make the games more prominent again we're looking at different parts of messenger to increase the the discovery surfaces stories as everybody has probably heard stories are a huge area of growth in terms of content consumption in their actions so we're looking at how how we can make instant games a part of the storage experience and we're looking at different formats just around sharing and more I'd say

traditional ways to get your games out and help people connect with one another in terms of paid discovery this is we've been working on effectively taking what is our our mobile app add the app install add they many of you if you have games in the traditional app source if have probably used and found users with we've basically adapted this for for instant game so it appears in the in the Facebook newsfeed the great part is no download required you can just click person can play the game and then they continue to have that experience they can go to messenger to interact with their friends so this is an open beta so there's a list we can whitelist people we hope this to be going fully fully open global launch anytime soon so monetization again very very important part of the equation for those who've been with us for a while I see a couple face of them some smiling some not we had a year where there's no

monetization in the platform and we've invested a lot in the last little while to really try to to make it a more robust part of the platform and really start to to bring all the different types of tools to bear so add multiples Asian we've affected we've plugged in the audience network there interstitial ads for simpler games and rewarded video for for deeper games again we're continuing optimize those formats we're continuing to learn and figure out you know how do we how do we get the best CPM so how do we make sure that those ads really perform because again the instant games experience is frankly is different from audience Network but you do have all the benefits of all the targeting and scale that comes from being part of the the Facebook side in terms of access to all of that inventory and then of course a net purchase so this is where we've also been investing a lot in app purchases available for anyone it's on Android over web today we're starting to see more games used in

app purchases more effectively again the games themselves have evolved the platform's evolve we're starting to see some people actually really start to to make use of this and really start to see their businesses scale as a result so last thing I just want to touch on a few of the tools that we some of these are our new summer in development some have been around for a while so homescreen shortcuts again this is one of the differences from the App Store you obviously you can find the game anywhere the challenge is how do you find it again so we rolled this out earlier on Android iOS this home screen shortcut so effectively we prompted the second time anyone plays your game we encourage people to actually create a shortcut on their home screen for their phone you also as a developer have an API that you can use and again we've seen we've seen really good results with this hopefully we'll get there eventually there we go we've seen someone less pharmacy and ten percent of

their their DS coming through home screen shortcuts again it's really one of the ways that we've worked to offset the challenges of being within the messenger context and we're starting to see again really positive results cross promotion again as more developers build more apps who wanted to give people the ability to actually circulate traffic from game to game so this is again an API you control as a developer you can cross promote from one game to the other you can integrate it however you want this is for pics one word load um have have created a surface at the bottom of their games where you can access all the different games any new 15% of the new players are coming through cross promotion so a great way in a world where you can get a lot of viral traffic you can ensure you're pushing people to the game that's most their highest engage has highest engagement highest retention or ultimately highest monetization so again building community this is a kind of a core part of what we're doing at Facebook across the board we're really trying to make sure that

regardless of the surface people are able to and the type of content people can find communities and build communities instant games is no different if you look at people like ever weighing in others they've been able to build really really strong communities both on pages and in groups groups is an area we've invested a lot in over the past year or two as a company and we're actually looking at how we can also bring game play into groups as well so again if you're already in a group of friends or a group of whatever interaction html5 is so flexible you can start to look at ways you can actually play the games themselves a group as well as in the newsfeed and our messenger matchmaking again as we get more competitive games in the platform we wanted to facilitate a way for people to challenge other people who weren't necessarily their friends but who are competitive or similar levels in the game so this is another API we've introduced so you can basically find people who you want to play against or a similar level we help you find those relevant people based on their their progression in the game and then that'll create an actual messenger thread so you do these people aren't your friends we

all know they're it's great play with your friends sometimes your friends aren't very good or sometimes they're way better find people of similar skill levels is important and fun and lastly again this is as the platform of alls we continue to learn and as always continue to be amazed when we see what developers like yourselves are coming up with the types of games the formats of games there's on resent really looking at how do you how do how do we effectively provide you with all the tools possible to make those great games without having to rebuild everything so we're building up more and more api's so we have a bunch of for competitive gameplay we have leaderboards we're building up more and more tools really to make it easier for you to make make those great games you don't have to reinvent the wheel each time again we're building a native components and then there's deeper and deeper integrations we're building out so as we continue to move forward there'll be more and more tools again so you can focus on making great games and we focus on optimizing the platform that's all I have for today I'll pass

over to the rest of the group who are making games we appreciate your support and your time and we're just getting started so thank you very much [Applause] see Bob we have a couple of minutes before the next speaker did you want to take some questions maybe from the happy that it was anyone I haven't share some questions for some questions for Bob here I'm hoping maybe I can start okay so you mentioned right at the start that there's a lot of games on the platform at the moment and you might be looking to create that a little bit differently what does that mean for the app approval process is it going to be more stringent can you perhaps talk about that a little bit yeah great question so essentially what we're trying to do is again we want it to always be an open platform because that's kind of part of our general philosophy we do have a pretty thorough app review so we're working on continuing to to evolve that to make sure that again quality games and games that don't infringe on any platform policies are the ones that go live but we're also just trying to ensure that we don't have hundreds of games coming to platform at one day from one developers

so we're essentially looking at moderating the number of games per developer in a given week so it's essentially it's not to close the platform or anything it's more just in a way just to sort of ensure we have we don't have thousands of games coming because there are html5 one of the virtues is the games are very easy to make one of the challenges that the games are very easy to make so we're trying to balance that out to make sure we have a consistent flow of high-quality games all right thank you any other questions for Bob while we have him nope oh so one at the back there we go hi there we go this is work oh yeah these safe players progress like if you play the game can you get that to where you were yes yeah yeah you these different ways to do it but it is you can run your own server on the back end so you can save state however you want but we have different ways you can save within the context so st. you and I are

playing in a game you can we have it a way this allow you to save that state or if you're saving overall progress so there's different ways to do it I and I can show you that yes exactly yeah um thank you um did you see another questions through was there another one from uh it's it's Craig Chappell pocket game absorb is everyone Cheers so you cut your 30% revenue share on Android because my questions are why did you do that and how will you make money from those games it's a great question as as I was saying to one of your colleagues not that long ago at Gamescom you know our our mission obviously is we want to build a sustainable ecosystem what developers really successful and grow their games so we looked at effectively we did an initial rollout with IEP and we wanted to we wanted to look at the economics and just ensure the developers could grow so we made the decision in order to

you know really help the platform grow more quickly and developers grow grow their games we decide to remove the incremental revenue you know we're in this for the long term I guess is the way I put it and if developers are successful ultimately we'll be successful there's you know when we see the potential for the platform to scale part of it is engagement we will you know will find Facebook will benefit from different channels but ultimately the main priorities for developers in the short term to be successful [Music]