The Snapchat Revival:
How Gaming Feature Can Help the App
What was once viewed as ground-breaking, now is losing ground.
The revolutionary introduction of Stories, or, as the ancient people know it, Snaps, brought Snapchat into the centre of attention and created millions of loyal and happy customers out of the internet users throughout the virtual world.
As the inventor of visual messaging (or at least a better version of it) Snapchat quickly rose to fame and went toe to toe with other giants in the communication field.
Today, however, it seems that that toe to toe situation brought Snapchat down from the pedestal, but this company is not exactly cut out for sore losing. The new project which Snap, the parent company of the social app, announced is an effort to restore Snapchat to its former glory.
Oh, Snap!
The humble beginnings of the Snap app are traced back to 2011. The initial idea on which the founders based the app was to create a medium for communication which will allow sending messages in the form of photographs. That’s how they came up with the name – communicating via snaps.
When they first started out, they couldn’t even imagine the scope of success and popularity the app would achieve. Years later, they found themselves at the top of the social media chain, right along with Facebook and other similar apps. But what brought Snapchat so much popularity?
The crown jewel of Snapchat’s offer and the original culprit that triggered the future unfortunate chain of events was the Story feature. This feature enabled the users to post photos which remained on the users’ profiles for only a limited period of time. Better known as Snaps, photos would stay visible to other followers for only 24 hours before they disappeared completely. We know that it’s starting to sound familiar, so we’ll cut to the chase.
The concept of the feature was taken by several apps and published under another name. The first app where this feature appeared was Instagram, another social media app that deals with photos and videos. Instagram belongs to the group of apps owned by Facebook, so the feature quickly followed on the rest of the apps in that group including WhatsApp and Facebook.
The new name that introduced this unique feature to bigger audiences is Story. Millions of users of Facebook and Instagram came to love the app so much that today no other feature can rival it in terms of popularity.
What helped these apps greatly hindered another, the original source.
The percentage of Snapchat users took a plunge as the feature gained momentum on other platforms. This lead straight to Snapchat’s relative fade into the background, as the millennials as the central target audience turned their attention to other social media outlets.
Changing the Game
The new strategy for regaining the place under the spotlights introduces a brand-new feature to our app. This new innovation will bring games onto the platform, allowing its users to play a wide selection of games within the app.
The “Project Cognac” feature will enable seamless play to increase the number of hours users spend on the platform. Numerous software companies are mentioned as collaborators and contributors to this project. One of them is the Prettygreat gaming studio. The Australian studio now belongs to Snapchat. Some of the studio’s partners are familiar to the public as creators of famous games such as Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride. Another source of help is Tencent, the famous Chinese developer responsible for creating League of Legends and the online version of Call of Duty.
The list of games that will be featured on the platform has not yet been disclosed, nor is the exact type of games that we can expect to find there. Right now, the Snap company allows for advertisements targeting gambling and lotteries, so given that the online casino industry is booming, we are not sure whether we might find even products such as slot games offered on the platform in regulated and licensed markets.
The Hope of Tomorrow
It is not possible to accurately predict what this new initiative will bring to both the company and the app.
For now, the vision of hope exists. Considering how gaming has become of the key industries on a global scale, merging gaming with social apps is one wise move. And very lucrative as well – as this is not the first instance of such a case. We’ve already seen Facebook introduce numerous games within the app, a move which proved an instant success.
Will it prove as successful for Snapchat, time will tell. One thing is sure: Snap aims to get back to the top and snap the competition in half in the process.
