Facebook has announced its Instant Gaming platform for Messenger. With this, the company brings games like Pacman, Space Invaders, Galaga, Words With Friends, and more, to its online chat service. Instant Games is an HTML5-based gaming platform, which allows users to play games. It is also a cross-platform service, and will be compatible with both desktop and mobile versions of Facebook Messenger.
The Instant Games service is in closed beta right now, with 17 games in total. Facebook has big names like Konami, Bandai Namco and Zynga onboard as developers for this platform right now. While the service is currently advertisement free, Instant Games could become a major ad-platform for Facebook in future, depending on its popularity with users. The company could charge developers for promoting their games, while in-game advertisements wouldn’t be a big stretch either.
Facebook has added a new game controller icon to Messenger, which appears just below the space where you type your message. This icon grants access to all the games on Facebook Messenger right now. Of course, only the beta users will see these features at the moment, but Facebook should be making it public soon enough.
Instant Gaming is not Facebook’s first foray in this arena either. While games like Farmville, Mafia Wars and more have flourished on the social network in the past, the company has been making a more concerted efforts in gaming recently. This includes initiatives like Facebook Gameroom for PC Gamers. This is a PC gaming platform, powered by Unity, which aims to make the social network a target platform for those developing on Unity.