Using games to turn a chat-based platform into a real business

There are several messaging services out there with a critical mass of users and if all the users claimed are added up, then the total figure suggests a global population much larger than those currently on the planet! Are we falsifying the numbers or double counting?

The fact is, that in many cases consumers use multiple services, with each one positioned for something specific: a different circle of friends, a different way of interacting or even a different persona. In this respect, chat apps become social networks filling specific niches within the increasingly diverse digital lives of consumers.

As the players in the mobile messaging space move towards becoming real businesses, there is a trend towards reinforcing this differentiation with some maintaining a focus on providing a communication utility in return for accepting advertising, while others seek to offer value-added services on top of the messaging platform. In this transition, many messaging services are transitioning to messaging-based services. In other words, services that have messaging at their core, but are primarily focused on offering something more.

In the case of Palringo, we have always been about group communication, facilitating the creation of tribes and communities around specific areas of interest. Games and gaming have always been the most popular categories in our collection of communities and so we’ve invested a huge amount of time and effort into exploring different ways of driving convergence between our social environment and gaming.

Much of our work has focused on interactions with native games on mobile. How can we enrich a user’s gaming experience in another application? We’ve made great progress here, in terms of finding ways to bring bits of the game into Palringo, but also increasingly in finding ways to take the social elements of Palringo into the games. Helping players to compete, challenge and co-ordinate can be central to games that are inherently group-oriented, but can also substantially enrich what would otherwise be simple, single-player experiences. We’re continuing to push this convergence further with our own titles and, increasingly, through collaboration with third party developers.

Even more fascinating though has been the evolution of what we refer to as ‘Chat Games;’ games that are played within the chat stream itself. In the first generation of these Chat Games, the gameplay relied upon text commands that triggered specific actions within the gameplay.

These were engaging, but required substantial domain knowledge and made the games difficult to access for new users. In the ‘Swipe Generation’, nobody wants to write algebraic commands to progress through a game and so our challenge was to find an innovative way to maintain the integration of the game within the chat stream while at the same time bringing a graphical control element that also makes it easy to distribute information asymmetrically. Our new GamePad feature (soon to be released) does just this.

We have also realised that the chat platform itself is a game. With games, status and loyalty are everything and we know from our 350,000+ groups that our customers love games and they love to compete. Within the day-to-day interactions across our community we see active competition amongst users seeking to build reputation and out-do each other through rankings and achievements.

For us, this creates a platform where the communications and the play are tightly integrated. While a new member of the community might initially be solely focused on a specific game, once in a group it’s the community that stimulates on-going engagement and provides the connectivity to other games and other challenges. This is helped by a dedicated Community Team, which organizes challenges, tournaments and competitions to keep competition fresh and engaging. All the elements that make for a true multiplayer gaming platform and help to grow the community, which is how we envisage our Chat Games evolving.

Connecting people around the world based on a common interest, in this case gaming, rather than people who already know each other, offers another dimension of chat-based engagement and allows people to interact differently than they would with their friends. Not a disparate group of players in different games, but a cohesive community focused on games. Not around a linked console, but around a mobile device.

We also believe that chat provides a great platform for a multitude of services, be that calling a cab or shopping over that platform. “Hey, get me a taxi” certainly feels better than a 25-click journey through a dedicated app, but we are most excited about the transformation of a chat-based platform into a new type of multiplayer gaming platform with great user experience. We think it’s the future.