What is an Instant Game?

Instant games is the platform in the facebook’s messenger which provides and SDK with which developers can put their HTML5 games in the platform and make it available in iOS/Android and WEB .

We’ve tested an Instant Games during the closed beta tests and since that it has changed a lot

Now we can take a look to some instant games to have better understanding which type of instant games can be there.

Types of Instant Games

Single Player games

The first type of instant game are the simple single player games. There you can use Instant games SDK to make Leaderboard, Sharing dialog, Payments, Invites and etc. And they are mostly based on front-end part.

Types of Instant Games

Multiplayer Turn Based Games

The second type of instant games are the multiplayer turn based games. There you also rely on the SDK to send your moves to friend via messenger and keep the context and state of your game with the SDK.

Types of Instant Games

Realtime Multiplayer Games

And the third type is realtime multiplayer games. Here you mostly will use websockets to provide realtime communication, and in this type of instant games you’ll need just basic functionality of Instant games SDK, such as login, invite, share and payments. The rest will be done in you backend side, leaderboard, game state, turns, etc

Publishing Instant Games

To create an instant game you just need a facebook account, but for publishing there are couple of  things that you should take in count.

For the first you should have business account, where you’ll put information about your company or about you if you are an individual developer, tax information and etc.

It’s not necessary to have a verified business account for launching a game, but it gives you lots of advantages especially for boosting and SEO

The second thing is that you’ll need Apple Developer Team ID, which you’ll get when you enroll the Apple Developer Program

And the third you need working game which will satisfy the platform policies

After this you can send your game to review, which may take from two days to two weeks or more.

And after getting rejection you should wait a week before resubmission, because they don’t allow developers to send more than one game to review in a week

After passing the review you can launch your game softly or globally

So you can choose in which countries your game will be available test fix some bugs and then launch it globally

Facebook gives boost to the new launched games on the first 1-2 days, but it will work now if your business is verified, and some people say that if you start from the soft launch you can miss the boost, but if your game will keep the retention high it can have about ~100k users in a week

Monetization In Instant Games

Monetization in instant games can be done in two ways: ads and in-apps

Ads are the main monetization method in most instant games, there are two types of ads simple banners and rewarded videos, the last one is valued more then simple banners

You can also have payments in instant games but it’s currently not supported in iOS and can be tested only on Android, game payments need to pass a separate review