Facebook Messenger is testing “Instant Games” like this one from King

Facebook Messenger is preparing to launch a new “Instant Games” platform that will let people play lightweight games against friends. Candy Crush maker King.com is already testing one of these Instant Games called “Shuffle Cats Mini” in New Zealand, TechCrunch has discovered. And other studios including Big Viking also appear to be prepping for the Instant Games launch.

Facebook has been largely shut out of the native mobile gaming world by Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. But by building games into Messenger by using it as a portal to mobile web apps, Facebook could create a new platform that drives Messenger engagement. Users could come to Messenger to play Instant Games, challenge friends via Facebook Messages, and potentially earn Facebook a cut of in-game purchases. Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Earlier today, The Information reported that Facebook is building the Instant Games platform for asynchronous games that you can take turns playing with friends, not necessarily at the same time. Instant Games expands on the success of the chess, basketball, and soccer mini-games Facebook itself built for Messenger earlier this year by allowing third-party developers to build them too. Facebook plans to release a development kit or tool later this month, though developers haven’t been told if they’ll be able to charge for in-game purchases.

The First Instant Games

The Information wrote that Facebook is already privately testing Instant Games, though it didn’t name any studios. TechCrunch has discovered casual gaming giant King.com already has a Facebook Page for its Shuffle Cats Mini game that it refers to as “a slick card-flicking Instant Game from King”. The Page is actively allowing users in certain regions like New Zealand to play, but those in the US get an error message when they try to load it on mobile. Shuffle Cats Mini seems to partially load on the web, revealing a game where you fling cards at targets in a little shooting gallery, but you can’t finish a game or share your score to compete with friends — which would mirror how Messenger’s basketball and soccer games worked.

After some more digging, we found that earlier this week, a startup called Big Viking announced it’d raised over $21 million to build “HTML5 instant games”, according to VentureBeat. When I asked Big Viking CEO Albert Lai today about the company’s plans, he told me “HTML5 is a technology that basically allows us to embed our games into anything and everything as well as inside messenger platforms with bots. In any messenger platform, [people] can play our game. This completely shifts the power in the distribution system. Anywhere there’s a messenger we can deliver our games instantaneously.” Yet when I asked if that meant Big Viking’s title could be Facebook Instant Games, he suddenly got cagey and told me “I can’t speak to anything related to what we may or may not be doing on Facebook.” That makes it sound like Facebook forbid him from discussing it.

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Five principles for building the next great video platform

Video is eating the internet. It accounts for nearly 75 percent of internet traffic, with Americans consuming more than an hour of online videos each day — more than three times as much as in 2011.

Established platforms like YouTube and Netflix capture a large portion of this traffic, but there also are a number of new players exploiting the video opportunity. Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook, all originally photo platforms, are enthusiastically embracing the video format, and a crop of new video-first platforms like Twitch and Musical.ly are growing exponentially.

As investors, we look for trends that reveal future opportunity. Increased appetite for video led Bessemer to invest in great companies like Twitch, Smule and Periscope. As video continues to grow, we will continue to invest. In understanding where the next opportunity may lie, one question we ask ourselves is: What principles do transformative new video platforms have in common?

Recently, we hosted Spotlight: Video, an event that brought together leaders in online video to help answer this question (and others). Through their perspectives and conversations with up-and-coming video startups, we’ve distilled a set of five principles critical to success in the video space.

While no such list could be comprehensive, and every rule has exceptions, we are excited to contribute our thoughts to the ongoing conversation about the future of the medium.

If your model is driven by user-generated content (UGC), creating a video should take seconds, not minutes

New platforms aspire to have millions of consumers creating and sharing videos in a uniquely compelling way. Most fall short of this goal for one simple reason: It’s incredibly difficult to create an interesting piece of content quickly. Your platform may have a dazzling array of features that enable creative expression, but if the average user can’t make a great video in 30 seconds or less (ideally a lot less!), chances are they never will. In a world in which tens of thousands of apps compete for consumer attention, reducing the “time to value” (i.e. the time required for a user to create something delightful) is critical. For example, Snapchat lets you easily record video, string it together and add filters and messages, creating complex content in seconds with a couple of taps, as illustrated by DJ Khaled’s lost at sea story.

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