After yesterday where Google revealed Stadia, their new stream-based gaming platform, it now looks like Snapchat is prepared to announce something in April. Cheddar originally reported that Snap Inc. will be announcing their new gaming platform on April 4th at the Snap Partner Summit which takes place in West Hollywood, California. The event is being promoted with the slogan, “Less Talk. More Play”. According to their sources, the event will have the debut of internal codenamed, “Project Cognac”.
Originally, the gaming platform was supposed to launch this past Fall with an in-app store and support for external developers. It makes sense for Snapchat to make a gaming platform since the app has been very popular for sharing images and chatting with friends. Although Snapchat has been popular, they’ve had problems with user engagement and a large number of gamers use the app compared to other social media. 58% of Snapchat users play mobile titles. Then you have 40% of them playing console titles which is more than Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
It’ll be interesting to see the type of games you’ll be able to play through Snapchat, but I would think we can expect an integration with using your phone camera and more importantly getting your friends to play with you. It doesn’t looks like it’ll be a major platform announcement like Google had with Stadia since this is mobile only and will not require a controller. It’s unclear if this will help user engagement with the popular app.
There are a lot of companies planning multiple announcements in the coming weeks including Gearbox. Next week they’ll be hosting a panel at PAX East which could feature Borderlands 3 along with reveals for other Borderlands titles on the Switch and an indie game reveal.
What do you expect to see out of this Snapchat reveal?
