On March 14, the social network Facebook announced that any team can now develop and publish projects on its HTML5 platform of instant games. No more closed favorites list.
What is it about?
In November 2016, Facebook launched a closed beta service that allowed playing simple HTML5 games directly in Messenger without downloading the distribution kit. The new platform was named Instant Games.
Instant Games
In May of the following year, a public release for all users took place.
From that moment on, any user could launch one of the fifty projects available on the site directly from the Facebook messenger.
Why might Instant Games be of interest?
Almost immediately after the launch of the platform, information began to appear in beta that projects on it are able to gain an audience very quickly. For example, Endless Lake of the Netherlands Spil scored 12 million players on it in 21 days.
Endless Lake
In March 2017, before the worldwide release of Instant Games, the president and founder of Avallon Alliance, Artur Ostapenko, said that most games on the site gather a million users in the first week.
Considering the Messenger MAU of 1.2 billion, this is not so much. A strong project with high virality may be able to achieve more on this new and still not crowded with projects platform.
The games came out then, what has changed?
Previously, a limited number of developers had access to the platform. According to our sources, Facebook has not expanded the developer pool since the platform went into beta. Even access to the documentation was prohibited by the confidentiality agreement.
There was a classic on the platform from the very beginning
In other words, it was possible to leave an application for access, but in fact, only the teams selected by Facebook could run the games.
Among the latter were, for example, Game Insight, Capcom and Blackstorm.
Now the social network is ready to accept projects from a wide range of developers, and documentation on working with Instant Games has become available to everyone.
What about the functionality of Instant Games for developers?
You can now play ads in games. It’s about both full-screen banners and rewarding videos. These formats, according to the developers from the FRVR studio, give a comparable eCPM and ARPDAU with other mobile platforms.
Example of a rewarding video on the platform
To measure the effectiveness of the game and advertising, you can now use the Monetization Manager tool recently launched by the social network.
It allows you to “increase revenue, simplify work with advertising placement and see analytics.” Facebook has also added Instant Games reports to Facebook Analytics to understand and optimize the platform’s “unique social context.”
But the most interesting thing is the support of cross–promotion and deep links. With the help of the first one, developers will be able to promote their new projects or updates to them within their entire audience. The second opens up the possibility to send links to the gameplay itself outside of Facebook.
As for the IAP, they have not been delivered yet. Still testing.
Source: Facebook