Facebook recently announced that they are changing around their games section. While it might not seem like a large difference from what they’ve done in the past, they’ve promised changes for the developer experience.
“In the past we’ve used some pretty blunt instruments to deal with a problem we had, which was that some people really loved seeing game content in their feeds, and others felt it was spammy” said Carl Sjogreen, head of Facebook’s platform product team.
It used to be that if a game was something you’ve used, you’d see it in a feed, but now that’s changing. “So with these ranking changes we’ve done a much more nuanced job of trying to understand the quality of game content on Facebook as reported by users,” Sjogreen added. “If an app is contributing content that gets clicks, likes, et cetera, we consider that premium content.”
Users will also be able to make app recommendations to other users. Sjogreen says they want to encourage more and better games on the platform, and give more relevance to games with the ticker. “Fundamentally we want to have a relationship with developers on the platform where our incentives are aligned,” says Sjogreen.
To head of games partnerships Sean Ryan, games are very important for Facebook. “Users who play games on Facebook are more highly engaged than those who don’t, and they also report more happiness with Facebook in general so we should be catering more to them.”
“It’s not about getting as many gamers as possible. It’s about getting gamers who are more engaged, said Ryan. To everyone’s surprise, games took off. This is not a games company at core. But by last year we had an unbelievable games and growth story, but it was impacting other areas of the platform.”
At first, many games and apps did produce spam for users, but now that the problem has been tamped down, they want to enable communication more intelligently. “The key here is re-open virality for games,” concluded Ryan.
Source: Gamasutra
