Gaming on Snapchat could be just around the corner

Poor Snapchat. It carves out a place for itself in an overcrowded social network market by offering something truly unique, self-destructing messages. It does so well that it ends up becoming a public company worth billions of dollars. Success draws attention, however, and before long, Snapchat was being cannibalized by other social networks offering “Stories” that disappear after a set amount of hours.

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Fortunately for Snapchat, self-destructing messages wasn’t the only string to its bow as the company houses a fair amount of innovation. Cool filters and stickers for example or Augmented Reality effects that you can put right there in your snaps. Snapchat is now working on a new feature. It wants to create a Snapchat gaming hub so that third-party developers can create games for Snapchat users.

The platform should be ready for launch in the fall, and a report from The Information claims Snap has already lined up at least one gaming publisher to the project. What is less clear, however, is what the games will be like or even whether they’ll be AR-based titles that fit with the current Snapchat experience or whether they’ll be something else altogether.

Snapchat introduced Snappables, small mini-AR games, back in April. This new effort, however, seems to a much bigger project with Snap providing the platform for third-party developers to create bigger and more ambitious titles. These titles will then be available for download via an internal app store.

With so many sharks in the water already taking bites out of Snapchat’s originality, this move could open up new waters for the beleaguered Snap. Snapchat boasts a young and engaged user base, which could be much more open playing games in the app than users have been playing games in Facebook or Messenger for example. If game developers can find a way to utilize Snapchat’s AR platform effectively, Snapchat really could start sailing out into unchartered waters again.

We’re looking forward to seeing what happens here.