If you thought that games were just a way for Facebook to make some easy money, think again. The company is serious about it and are offering tools for developers to add even more options for achievements and high score rankings.
When Facebook launched “now playing” stories in news feeds, they saw a 60% increase in new users installing games via these news feed stories. The Facebook developer blog detailed today what they’re going to do to capitalize on that momentum.
The three changes coming to Facebook games is the ability to display achievement, passing and high score stories to news feeds. This will increase visibility of Facebook games and encourage repeated plays through competition.
The achievement story will be a self-contained news feed post featuring the achievement that a friend just obtained.
The passing story will compare high scores between friends and alert them if a friend has passed their high score in a game.
The high score story is pretty straightforward as it publishes a post whenever a friend gets a new high score in a game.
All three stories share one thing in common – they encourage people to play games through a link in the post that will take users to install the game. Stories will also get more circulation as they get more clicks, likes and comments.
To encourage more play time in games, Facebook encourages developers to run weekly high score tournaments. They also encourage achievements to be described in such a way that make it easier for people to understand.
Check out the blog post for the specific code you can implement in Facebook games to make them compatible with these new changes.