How Facebook supports developers in getting their games discovered

the morning is drawing to a close here at Papa Gator connects 2018 in London I'm joined by Morgan Monet from a little company called Facebook good to have you here sir thank you very much for having me now then the second the mic is actually so we're specifically interested in you know the games of it all Facebook is obviously this huge platform that deals with lots of other things but specifically you guys are focusing on bringing games not only to the browser platforms but also more recently to the messenger app so now you've got these html5 games that exists within the app that you can play when they initially came out at poppy gamer we all started downloading them and interacting and playing with them firstly how much of a struggle was it to get them into the apps working in a way that was streamlined and easy to access and secondly how do you get the right people playing the right games so that's a very interesting question so messenger is a very interesting platform and we

have a team that's developing it I mean constantly and instant games recently launched it's been a year I think we developed it was the first year anniversary yesterday or something I guess for instant games and we had some wonderful presentations during Pocket Gamer talking about instant games I think that's bringing a social interaction component to messenger is very interesting opportunity being that today we have over 1.3 billion people on messenger which is quite insane thinking about it exactly but when it print ain't exactly what I do so I don't miss work specifically on the messenger platform there's a specific team dedicated to that so I wouldn't be able to specifically talk about messenger and instant games to it but when it comes to your second question about how we're trying to help games get discovered so the team I work

on is obviously games and we have a lot of sub segments to the game so we have the platform's team and other teams such as the inter-gang school and then the team I specifically work on helps advertisers or game developers scale and develop their game and our main focus is to make sure that the game developers are leveraging the right tools for user acquisition obviously today's when you look at gaming for facebook it's one of the most important verticals for us we think that the industry is so vibrant and there's so much opportunity overall in general to help these game developers reach the right audience that we have these four kind of pillars that I was talking about which is discovering watching playing and sharing and today Facebook's focus is really to help game developers get their game discovered then have a community where people can play watch

and share games and the play is that component of messenger you were talking about with the instant games component so one of the tricks I guess is you've got this ridiculously huge user base right you got this audience you've got billions of people logging in every month just a you know two billion to kuba there you go all there and so it's almost an embarrassment of riches there in terms of here are all your users here's those other people and we've got these games that we want to push and hopefully get a good response from them so targeting the right game to the right user what's the trick there because presumably you're you've got data well lots of data and about picking the right points to say this game will suit this person and how how do you get that streamlined into a way that a developers can understand it and go right we can trust these guys to push it to the right place and from your end how do you kind of collect that data into a meaningful pattern recognition sort of thing how do you work out what goes where and who to

put the games to yeah so we're very lucky to have this wonderful community on Facebook where actually people engage engage with the content so on Facebook today we have 2 billion people on Instagram we have over 800 million people - I mean when you look at it as a an opportunity to get your game discovered it's tremendous and Facebook has developed tools over the years where we allow businesses not only gaming developers but businesses overall to be able to leverage the targeting audiences on Facebook and when it's specific to gaming you can basically find interest so you can target interest based audiences so say you have an MMORPG on mobile you can target people that are fans of MMORPGs or MMORPG titles and you know this because of you know stuff that they've liked or approves oh yeah absolutely its regards to the interaction there's things that users have showed on the platform where people have showed on the platform actually that they're interested in so I'm someone who loves and loves games

I've been playing since I'm a kid so every time there's a MMO a strategy game or whatnot i would interact with it and I usually get targeted by MMO strategy games and that's the premise of Facebook it's to be able to give the right content to the right people at the right time it's kind of a massive advantage to have that social platform tied into the gaming platform because if you are I don't know a developer who exclusively produces a particular kind of game you've got an audience there that you've cultivated and then you can maybe cross promote other games that developer has you know another match he possibly this guy like some actually pass this cuz he plays ours but beyond that beyond the play sessions and the genre that they like because that's what they've downloaded you don't know a great deal about that person whereas with something like Facebook you've got an immense amount of data about their daily activities what desserts they like to you know really specific stuff so presumably that gives you a bit of an advantage so one of the things that

Facebook gives developers the ability to leverage is the Facebook SDK which you can implement into your app and you can set specific events within your app such as tutorial complete level achieved or even the purchase events and last year well actually end of August 2016 we developed this optimization method called the oppenent optimization which is like kind of revolutionary for us and game developers because it allows you to find those valuable players for you through the kind of behavior they have in your app and by combining that with the Facebook targeting which I think is also a wonderful tool like it allows you to prospect people that look the most like the people in your app so say for example I have an app I have microtransactions and I put in these purchase events in my app well you can create a custom audience from this purchase event so I can basically say

these thousand people that purchased in my app I want to retarget them for example with cross promotion or I want to use this as a seed audience and find people that look the same as these people and then can go on Facebook target a word of the worldwide or country and then say find me people that trigger these type of events so really find those valuable users that behave the way you want them to and bring them into your app so in terms of 2018 what's the focus this year you mentioned the four pillars what's the thing that you're trying to improve or streamline or reach out toward so I feel like one thing that's been working really great for us has been Instagram stories and like that's a really cool format what it was I was anticipating just a few like a collated update post and it was Justin time he's platform so Instagram series is this new like vertical formats femural marketing which i think is very different than how we used to do

marketing back in the days but Instagram story's been working really well I mean I think we have a 300 million monthly active users on Instagram stories itself and also it's been showing very good metrics in terms of engagements so brands leveraging Instagram stories have more interaction they're really excited about as I was saying the discover watch play and share like think watch is gonna be a very interesting move in 2018 in the sense where video content is really important today it's an immersive format and I think that content is getting more and more important constantly so we'll see how 2018 looks but where we're keeping an eye out for all these everything's excellent and you'll actually be able to see the talk that you guys did here at the conference it'll be up on the site somewhere around Fiji so if you want to see what you guys were talking about here you can find it on the site but it's great to talk to you man that's a lot more next year

thank you you