The Wild Past and Possible Futures of Messaging App Games
Plus, Discord Founder and CEO Jason Citron on his initial strategy for reaching gamers
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The Wild Past and Possible Futures of Messaging App Games
For decades, game devs have experimented with distributing games directly through instant-messaging apps. With promising channels like Discord Activities and powerful new web gaming tech emerging, is a breakthrough moment near?
In 2018 and 2019, an unofficial Pokémon game went viral on Discord.
The core idea behind the Pokécord bot was simple: in any server where the bot was installed, “wild Pokémon” would occasionally appear via an image prompt. The first user to correctly guess the creature’s name would “catch” it.
The interface was intuitive—just type “.catch [pokemon-name-here]” when prompted and you too could become a Pokémon trainer.
Before long, Pokécord reached 5 million players. Some reports indicated that the bot had been installed on over a million Discord servers before its developer suddenly shut it down.
This is the beauty of games: they can crop up almost anywhere. But games distributed via messaging apps also tend to have a flash-in-the-pan quality. They spread at warp speed and disappear just as quickly.
Could messaging apps ever become a viable platform for distributing “real” games? Or will messaging app games always be a novelty? With platforms like Discord and Telegram now investing more heavily in the space, it’s worth considering the potential future of these apps for games.
But first, a brief detour to consider how we got here.
The Decades-Long History of Messaging App Games
You could argue that games played via “messaging apps” have a history extending back hundreds of years, if you count correspondence chess played via the postal system.1 But most would probably look to early internet chat rooms, which fostered text-based games and even early multi-user dungeons (MUDs) that were precursors to today’s MMOs.
The first messaging app games as we would recognize them first emerged in the early 2000s, with viral instant-messaging applications like Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, and MSN Messenger. In 2001, Yahoo! collaborated with Capcom to publish a two-player Street Fighter rock-paper-scissors game. In 2003, MSN Messenger stepped things up with the introduction of Tic-Tac-Toe and a two-player version of Minesweeper that could be booted up from the messaging window.
In the 2010s, the Japanese and Korean “superapps” Line and KakaoTalk began integrating with existing mobile games to power social features like chat and leaderboards—helping games like Anipang reach tens of millions of players. These experiments hinted at the power that popular messaging apps have to facilitate massive organic distribution of games, without disrupting the status quo of most mobile games being distributed through app stores.
The modern era of messaging app games kicked off in 2016, when Apple launched iOS 10 with support for games within iMessage, including the casual game bundle sensation GamePigeon. Facebook Messenger followed quickly, launching its Instant Games platform with titles like 8-Ball Pool and Words With Friends.
In 2017, China’s WeChat also began embedding HTML5-powered “Mini Games” directly within its app. Its first big hit was Tiao yi tiao (“Jump Jump” in English), a one-touch jumping game that reached 100 million daily players within weeks. Advertisers including Nike and McDonalds saw an opportunity and reportedly paid millions for sponsored ad slots within the game.
In the years since, LINE, KakaoTalk, Telegram, and Snapchat have all experimented with games distribution, with varying levels of success. But only recently have a number of technical developments in the web-gaming space begun to conspire.
We now see at least two possible pathways forward for messaging app games:
Possible Future #1: Next-Gen “Web” Games That Live Everywhere
There have been many attempts to take on Minecraft, but few have caught on quite like Bloxd.io. The game’s product lead, Nick Baker, tells speedrun that the game—first released in 2021—currently has over 6 million monthly active players, and continues to grow.
One important key to this growth: it’s available just about everywhere.
You can boot up the web-powered Bloxd.io app from any web browser, or within Discord Activities, including from the mobile version of the Discord app. Baker says that the Discord version of the game is smaller relative to the browser version of the game, which has seen enormous growth in part thanks to its distribution on CrazyGames.com.
But, Baker says, Discord “has helped us tap into new audiences, primarily through content creators who discovered us through the platform. It’s a valuable platform, even if it’s not our largest channel.”
A similar under-the-radar hit is Smash Karts by the Irish developers Tall Team. The Unity-powered game is essentially a play-anywhere take on Mario Kart’s Battle Mode, and features an official mobile app as well as a Discord Activity and browser version with distribution through portals like CrazyGames.com and Poki.
Tall Team co-founder Paul O’Donnell says the game recently reached 3 million monthly active players, and its creators are pleased with the performance so far of the Discord Activities version of the game, which just had its global launch last week.
Supporting so many platforms can be a challenge, but O’Donnell says his team has a clear route to improve the game, and talks about the future of Smash Karts in much the same way AAA game developers talk about big-budget live service games: “We have a long roadmap ahead of us which includes a bunch of new seasonal content, arenas, game modes, weapons, and additional features especially relating to improving the realtime multiplayer experience,” he says.
Bloxd.io’s Nick Baker is similarly bullish on the future: “I’ve spent my career working in underappreciated niches, and right now I believe web games are one of the most exciting and undervalued spaces,” he says. “We aren’t quite at the peak of the Flash era from the mid-2000s, but I expect that we'll see a resurgence in the next few years, this time with far more advanced and engaging experiences.”
Possible Future #2: Can Telegram Games Go Deeper?
Spekter Games2 founder Taehoon “TK” Kim has 20 years of experience building and running free-to-play online games across PC, console and mobile platforms. But now Kim’s eye is on Telegram, which he believes has enormous untapped potential for games.
Telegram already has a bustling games scene, with millions of players on titles like TapSwap, Catizen, and Hamster Kombat. And because Telegram has built-in support for a cross-app premium currency (called “stars”) and a native cryptocurrency (TON), some developers are successfully monetizing in ways not typically seen in messaging apps.
Telegram’s strong support for crypto led it to become a major hub for the play-to-earn gaming community. Kim argues this has created a challenge for devs, since the play-to-earn community isn’t necessarily the best audience for difficult games from traditional genres. "If you put hardcore enemies in front of them, they're like: Oh s—, I can't win this. And they'll bounce,” Kim says.
But there are a wide variety of more mid-core game genres—Kim lists Vampire Survivors and Capybara Go! as examples—that anybody can play, while still offering monetization potential on par with hardcore games.
Kim’s bet, and his plan for Spekter Games, is that by going deeper, game devs can build more sustainable businesses on Telegram. “If you make a great game that puts players’ desires first,” he says, “people will start to care more about their progression, and they’ll play more and spend more.”
The Next Unlocks for Messaging App Games
Cross-platform support for richer and more complex messaging app games will no doubt be important for enabling the next phase of growth for these channels. But there are also a few other emerging trends that could unlock a new phase of growth for messaging app games:
It could become increasingly easy to distribute games via a single link that opens the app in whatever app you prefer to use
Deeper integration between games and community platforms like Discord could dissolve the barriers between chatting with friends and playing games together
Cross-app premium currencies and support for easily portable wallets could enable in-app-purchases—without the barriers typically expected when going through traditional app stores.
If you’ve got a view on the future of messaging app games, let us know in the comments.
Jason Citron on Discord’s initial strategy for reaching gamers
Last week we were very proud to host Discord founder and CEO Jason Citron as the final guest speaker for the class of Speedrun 004. In the Q&A session with speedrun founders, Andrew Chen asked Citron: “What was the initial insight for why people will use [Discord] instead of TeamSpeak or Skype?”
Here’s how Citron responded:
We would hear stories, especially from Twitch streamers, where they would get a Skype notification… and their Skype name would show up on the screen. And if you just knew someone's Skype name, you could get their IP address through the system, because of the way Skype was built. And then people would DDoS their home computer… So they couldn't use their internet home for a week until Comcast rolled their IP address.
I have like 20 of these [examples]. If you stack them all up, you basically have a situation where there's a consumer base that is super passionate, tech savvy, early adopters that are being underserved by complacent companies, or by companies that are just not focused on them. And we just had an in.
—Jason Citron, Founder and CEO of Discord
💡 More Big Ideas
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The first reliably documented games of correspondence chess were played in 1804, between a military officer stationed in The Hague and a friend in Breda, Netherlands (about 39 miles away). There is also a long-lived but sketchy rumor that King Henry I of England and King Louis VI played a game of correspondence chess way back in 1119.
Spekter Games is an a16z speedrun portfolio company.
For having developed 10 html5 and WebGL games over the past 10 years, I’m a firm believer of instant interactions and the potential of WebGL to deliver the same experience as native games, but I think at the end of the day, what makes a game successful is still its design, both graphics, UX and gameplay, that’s still so core to the quality and success of a game that instant games cannot play solely or mostly on that technical aspect. It has to be mixed with other proven success factors like network effects and one or more of the 7 powers.
Love it!