It’s Playtime!

Alright, drop everything. Pause the cat video. Reply to your emails later. No, you can’t go to the washroom, this is urgent.

Facebook Messenger has games now!!!

Now you can do the following things with your friends in your chat groups:

• Run around and jump over obstacles over a big (infinite?) lake.
• Relive the joys of your youth with your only true childhood friend, Pac-Man.
• Avoid/shoot at menacing aliens.

And the list goes on. As I write this, Messenger has 17 games hot off the press.

I don’t have anything to add beyond my unfiltered enthusiasm for this new development.

Oh wait, one more thing:

If Facebook opens this up to game developers in the general public, I think this has a huge chance of completely disrupting the mobile gaming industry. There’s the obvious advantage this has of tying offsite activity more closely to social context. But an even bigger factor is the technical simplicity it would bring to mobile game development.

Right now, most mobile games are built using native tools. iOS apps are built in Swift (a language nobody knows) while Android apps are built in Java (a language nobody likes). More graphics-heavy games might use something like Unity, which isn’t the easiest thing to learn either. Most of these apps implement Facebook Login for reasons varying from saving your progress to allowing multiplayer features.

If Messenger becomes a platform for other micro-apps, though, then the old way of building a mobile game will become outmoded. Instead, developers will be able to use familiar web technologies (presumably React or a similar framework) to deploy to desktops and mobile at the same time. The best part: the user’s already logged in. The leaderboard’s already built. New games will get to focus on being fun to play instead of dealing with the networking headaches of a real-time app.

Sure, Apple and Google have SDKs for this sort of thing, too. What they don’t have, though, is your social network. They especially don’t have your closest friend groups; games on iOS‘s Game Center are mostly played between strangers.

Gaming is competitive, and competition is social. Hence Facebook is perfectly placed to turn their analogue of Game Center into a key offering of Messenger. Remember that they have more daily active users (~1B) than Apple has sold iPhones ever (~700M).

So here’s to more and better games in our group chats. I’ve got my fingers crossed for Scrabble.

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