Facebook has announced the launch of games that can be played right from within their Messenger instant messaging platform. The new feature, dubbed Instant Games, allows users to start a game that’s been sent to them in the midst of a chat session with one or more friends. Judging from the launch video, the concept is fortified by a dose of friendly competition. Players can see each others scores as they try to one-up each other.

While the social networking giant makes no claim that there is a link between gaming and Conversational Commerce, it’s certainly worth noting that Facebook is offering more content both to engage Messenger users and to keep them locked into the platform. According to this article in the Wall Street Journal, bringing games to Messenger users currently generates $45 million in monthly revenues for Facebook.

Instant Games marks one more step by Facebook toward making Messenger more like TenCent Corp.’s WeChat. That platform has proven to be an extremely lucrative combination of games, payment systems, transactional bots and real-time chat. Though there is ongoing discussion of salient differences in Chinese culture, bandwidth availability and device usage (smartphones versus tablets and “phablets”), evidence is mounting that smartphone usage is transitioning away from standalone apps to mega platforms based on instant messaging.

Natural language-driven bots will be next to make their presence known in this domain. This will be especially true with the younger demographic. Despite the immaturity of the underlying ecosystem and some of the core technology for developing and “publishing” bots, the conversational appeal of chatbots and games are nearly identical and there is a golden opportunity to tap into the same large audience that Facebook is addressing with Instant Games.

The implications for enterprises investigating or acting on the opportunity to engage their customers through messaging platforms is profound. It is a core topic in a forthcoming Opus Research report called, “Decision Maker’s Guide to Enterprise Intelligent Assistants.” In it we’ll explore the opportunities and tactics surrounding bots on messaging platforms, while digging into the technologies and features across a full gamut of solutions supporting intelligent assistance.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence

Tags: Intelligent Assistance, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, conversational commerce