Introducing Gaming Services: Login, Sharing & Player Finder for Games

on this growth track this morning and that is going to be alicia from facebook and this is going to talk to us about how to introduce gaming services so login sharing and player finding experiences uh from the facebook side uh alessio how are you doing can you oh you're still on oh yeah hey how's it going hi hello hi there how are you doing great so i will hand over to you and let you talk to us about what you guys at facebook are up to cool well thanks so much for hosting it's pleasure to be back on the stage you know and if uh virtually this time um i'm gonna share my screen uh so give me one second a very 2020 moment can you see my screen

[Music] can't see it at the moment oh lit up yet yes okay cool well hi everyone um welcome to the session um today i'm going to share the latest news around new sdk features that we developed specifically for games we're calling them gaming services and they include facebook login for games uh sharing for games and new player finder features so starting september 15 starting tomorrow all new game game apps that are on boarded through facebook will be able to integrate this gaming services across android and ios uh during our game developer showcases in march we talked about these upcoming gaming updates and today we're happy to share more details around these gaming specific services and products my name is alessia ristida and i'm part

of the strategic partnerships team based out in london and we help gaming developers to achieve better results with their games by integrating with the facebook features um so for today uh i'll first mention we'll go through briefly our community and the importance of gaming as a virtual girl vertical for facebook um we'll then move on to talk about gaming services our new suitable features uh there are releasing for game developers and we will close with some key facts on how to start integrating with the gaming services offerings in your game first of all when we talk about gaming and facebook we're really talking about a community of more than 700 million people that every month play watch and share gaming content one of the most important milestones in our journey has been the introduction of the gaming tab this is uh the tab you're seeing here on the right this is where you can find all the gaming content that is relevant to you and the more relevant this gaming content the more prominent the tab will

be up until reaching this prime real estate you see here of the home screen button um this is a testament really of the relevance of gaming uh in facebook's mission uh mark also pointed at gaming as one of our four strategic pillars for the next decade um so this gaming tab is really just the beginning as we develop new products we consider these three on the bottom left as our three strategic pillars the first one is watch where people can watch gaming content from their feed and interact with creators and their communities behind them in new and exciting ways the second is play so with millions of players coming every day to play games on facebook both on instant games and on canvas and third and last is the share pillar um where we're building tools for players to connect with gaming communities by design while giving developers deeper and more comprehensive tools uh to expand their player base organically the the k factor you were you were mentioning before uh

so our show our share pillar is also the strategic home of the gaming services to the features that we're going to talk about today our goal with the introduction of gaming services is mainly that of giving more freedom for people to choose how and what they share with developers while giving them more abilities to connect with other players and at the same time giving developers tools to drive engagement from and off facebook's ecosystem to us expand their user base um the gaming services uh is the laying foundation uh sorry the gaming services foundation is laid by the facebook login for games which is a powered up version of our traditional login built with games in mind this builds the tech foundation that enables uh games to also integrate new features that we are developing such as sharing new player invites tools and much more to come in the next months like rewards gifting and tournaments starting with uh login for games uh as

i mentioned this is a new version of login that maintains the same benefits of this traditional version while adding incremental features developer developed with games in mind as with traditional login uh players will be able to quickly log in with a couple of taps creating an account saving progress and maintaining a career and experience across multiple apps and platforms while maintaining the total control of the information they're sharing with the developer uh for the specific game we know different rules uh apply to different game genres and with login for games being adopted by such a wide array of different games we wanted to give developers and players uh the power to customize your experience even uh by customizing their player name and avatar so players will be able to quickly select between their player name on one side and on the other side or the facebook profile picture every time they log in so customizing their experience whether they're playing a more casual or

a more mid-court game with login for games we're also introducing gaming activity uh this is a one-stop hub uh that you find within the facebook that the blue app that allows players to customize uh their player identity on facebook by showcasing the streamers they love the game they follows and they follow and the game they play making it easy for other players to find and connect with them in a more in a more comprehensive and deeper way this is also part of our broader effort to contextualize social experiences for different ecosystems to make them more relevant whether the con the context players are interacting with is a business or a game and this gives more freedom for players to decide what kind of information they are sharing with gaming experiences being a gaming group or a food game as for developers instead this new contextualized onboarding experience that you will see from from tomorrow it will smoothen the onboarding process by allowing you to quickly select all the apis and permissions that are relevant to your specific context in this case a

game from the get-go login also represents a huge milestone in terms of technical robustness and integrity first of all it is based on a separate graph api domain creating stronger and stronger security and integrity it is also a true cross-platform solution uh with platform support including ios android unity java and more to come in the next months um and moreover all the feature all the future metrics are now available by facebook analytics which is a huge plus so not only uh you you're now able to to deep dive not only on login metrics but also for sharing and player finder so giving more tools to for developers to better evaluate game performance also from a platform perspective as mentioned before so login is just the beginning really indeed it enables a new word of features starting with sharing for gaming which you see here uh in the video so this new feature allows

players to share the best combos and their gaming experiences on the whole facebook family of apps and services including stories facebook stories and instagram stories and facebook groups while giving developers a new tool to expand the player base with socially driven organic engagement sharing does not happen on an api as you see here but it happens on dialogue so users will operate on the surface while choosing what they want to share after this player will receive a notification when the content is ready and the player would decide whether to share uh where and if to share this content on fb posts or stories on instagram poster stories groups or messenger and it also builds on top of user friends so a featured the feature that enables developers to build uh to build player player leaderboards so really we're expanding the context of what player uh where and how players can share their their content login to to go to the second feature also allows uh games to integrate with a

new player with a new flow for players to find other players to play to friends to play with uh both from the network of friends which we call the first degree connection and from the gaming groups of the game they're currently playing which we call second degree connection um the experience once again happens on the fb app side with a quick app switch which take the player on a new dedicated surface that you see here where they can explore the gaming profile of the friends they want to invite facilitating this new gaming connection and expanding the context and the content that they're able to uh to connect through with this new player with this new flow the player are able to not only invite as i mentioned the people from their network of friends which is currently the case but also people from the gaming groups that they share the app where the api is currently called so this opens a whole new world of opportunities to connect people through groups um we're especially excited about player invites for groups because we know gaming groups are such an integral part of the game experience for so many games out there

and this is really the first step in the direction of integrating groups in a in a more comprehensive more integrated way so player invites are the first entry points uh to this group integrations and player will be able to join gaming groups straight from this you know flow full of intention this intent full flow um we heard from many developers while in the last year while we were developing these features uh that people are already jumping uh to facebook groups facebook groups while in the middle of a game session uh to find players to play with to look for advice uh so it's great to provide this technological bridge to make that happen in a smoother fashion and also to allow players to learn which friends and second degree connections on facebook are also following the game's official gaming group as a developer you'll be able to set this up for the the group connected to your app in a very very easy way from the from the app dashboard so this is one of the features we're the most excited to uh to launch and so login for games sharing for games or

player finders are the just the first three uh gaming services that we are introducing but a much uh much more is on the way uh in the next months we'll be introducing a new revamped version of game requests giving players a new gaming centrum flow to invite friends in the game outside of the flow we mentioned before and we'll also be introducing tournaments which is one of the most successful products we launched recently and they will soon see a new version which is basically more integrated deeperly integrated in the game in a deeper way so more to come in the next months um as a recap so definitely this is a great moment for games and the journey just started um we introduced then a new login experience specifically designed for games uh which enables this new uh series of uh of features that are always developed with games in mind so a new sharing flow allowing to share on the full fame uh on the full uh facebook family facebook family of apps and services including instagrams and groups

uh new possibilities for players to find uh their friends including inviting players that are not that are part of the same gaming group and can share can't wait to share more about the newest development including rewards gifting and tournaments so for the time being as i mentioned before uh tomorrow we will launch our early access for gaming services and we will allow a percentage of newly created gaming apps to be automatically opted in if your game is not automatically enrolled you'll see the option for uh manual roll for manual locked in from the new onboarding flow that i mentioned before should you want to take part in this early access um of course your facebook team is always available for any questions so feel free to reach out and let's chat about this we'll we'll be very happy to do that and lastly our fb gg developers hub has all the most recent updates and that's where we're going to share more news in the coming months of the all the new features that we're going to release so stay on the lookout for for much many

more info in the coming months and game on so thanks everyone happy to take some questions if there is any right well thank you unless yeah that was fantastic uh i'm really excited by that kind of possibility of improving this login process making it better connection with gaming groups and are there anything sort of particular tricks or tips you've got for game developers who are keen to uh implement this stuff so the implementation is as i mentioned very very straightforward so for the first uh for this first phase uh we're gonna only onboard uh newly created apps so if you have a new game and you onboard the new gap then you this new app from the gaming dashboard from tomorrow uh you'll be either automatically opted in or you'll have the manual uh the manual opt-in side um we have plans during h1 to also uh transition existing apps to this login uh we're making sure one of the uh one of the things we're making sure that it happens that their users will not be

logged out of their existing session uh so even in that uh in that context the transition would be very very easy and very smooth uh it's basically as it is for now for for for the facebook sdk sure so somebody's already implemented a facebook sdk in an older game they'd need to do some work to one unpick that or would they uh would it be a fairly straightforward uh transition done at the back end yeah we still we're still finalizing the onboarding for existing gaps uh but the concept will be the driving factor will always be like a very smooth full transition and uh robustness technical robustness that we have uh uh we're building with the with the team uh from the from the from the gates and i think in particular this this idea of being able to share and to go cross between groups and to to kind of use facebook which i think is one of its biggest strengths is that collective interest you know that's because someone's into one particular game doesn't mean they're not into other games and how you cross fertilize is there going to be some sort of plans in place to sort of connect the

dots between the kind of user acquisition aspects and also the sort of ongoing engagement of players that's a great question i think like bridging the gap between what users are what players are actually doing how they're using our platforms and that that's basically our the first uh the first driving factor in our decision so we want to be closer to players we want to bridge that gap so this group as i mentioned before the group integration is something that players are already doing uh so we're just you know bridging that uh that gap there and it's the yeah so marching characteristic of the way facebook seems to me to be generally moving towards the community-centric spaces is that a summary definitely definitely our mission is to create community and these features are moving in the direction of allowing players to more easily connect to one each other uh in a less uh let's say in a very uh elegant way in a very non-spammy way that's that's also one of our

our first uh um our first criteria when we think about these things uh but definitely want to uh to boost that organic development of the user base uh through these features so i've got a question here from tanveer ahmed and it was asking if you can share any games that are already using this in beta uh whether we can get a sense of what the sort of ideal implementation might be yeah so i don't have the games top of my mind but on the fb gg developers hub we have uh some uh we have some screenshots from the game they're actually using this so you can you can find them there and in the next weeks we'll also be publishing some uh some best case some some success stories uh from results early results that these developers that participated in the in the beta uh saw so stay on the lookout also for those in the next very short term we'll be posting those i think what i find fascinating about this in particular is just how much more engaging you guys are being with developers and maybe historically has been the case i think it seems to me that you're really trying to pay attention to what game developers

are trying to ask for but also what players are asking for and i think that's something that i think a lot of people will find kind of useful does that mean that there's kind of a difference in mindset for you guys about how you want to engage with games definitely like as i mentioned at the beginning mark put gaming as one of the four pillars for for the next decade so you can you can imagine the the impact that that has on the on the corporate culture so that means that now gaming for facebook is your top priority uh we have a fairly big team that is working on all the different sides all the different work streams for uh allowing both developers and players to to be connected and to create these communities uh so definitely it's going to be a from now on it's going to be a very interesting time you're going to see a lot of a lot of new stuff coming in the next month but we just saw the oculus quest 2 announcement trailer come out today as well so definitely seems to be a lot of game related activity going on with you guys there's going to be a crazy autumn in terms of uh in terms of new features so very excited it's a very exciting time

to be alive that sounds great i think that's all the questions we've got so thank you so much for that let's see uh i think it's a really fascinating time to be working with you guys uh be interesting to see what happens i've got a couple of games we're working on definitely going to want to use that tech so thank you very much thanks so much and have a great day