How Facebook aims to keep game developers on its platforms (interview)

GamesBeat: I remember you had the GDC talk where you said developers share more data with you guys, and that helps you figure out what will help them.

Morris: That talk in particular was about the recommendation intelligence. But even if you’re just concerned with the player base you already have, you gain an interesting picture of what’s working for some players and what’s not working for others. It feeds some smart decision-making on your part.

Above: Samsung Gear VR with Oculus tech

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

GamesBeat: So App Links is just part of this?

Morris: App Links is the mechanism by which we actually direct you back to an app with some insight attached to it. App Links is not just a Facebook thing, too. It can be used by any two apps that want to deep link between each other. Let’s say I want to go from the Spotify app to the SoundCloud app. Usually if I click a link that goes to Spotify in SoundCloud, it would send me to a mobile web browser and load slowly. Even if I have both apps on my phone, there’s no way for them to talk to each other. App Links lets different native apps know if you have each app and then lets them talk to each other. It can directly open content in another app. We’ve seen a ton of growth there. Game developers are a great example. We’ve seen more than 7 billion App Links URLs created since last year.

GamesBeat: I’ve seen some other things here. Analytics are big. I wonder, if you’re offering more analytics than people normally get, is that starting to displace some of the tools they would use outside of Facebook?

Morris: Different tools are going to work for different people. The benefits of analytics are cross-device. If someone is moving — let’s say you’re browsing an item on your phone, look at it again on your tablet, and check out on your desktop. We can help developers better understand that that’s all the same person, which is really valuable if you’re trying to figure out — like, if someone sees an ad on the phone, does that affect sales on desktop later on?

The other thing we want to add that’s a unique benefit — it’s not about displacing anybody. It’s about adding something you can’t get anywhere else. That’s the demographic context. I talk to game developers every day. The biggest thing they’re excited about getting from our analytics product is the demographic information. You can’t get that anywhere else. Intelligent marketers are going to have a whole new dimension of analysis: real demographic insight into who’s downloading and playing.

Above: Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, gets a demo of Oculus VR and Facebook Teleportation.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat

GamesBeat: It raises the bar for anybody else’s offerings in analytics.

Morris: Analytics is a crowded space. No one can do this but Facebook, though. My guess is that in the early going, as we roll out this product, it will be the demographic information that the higher-end game publishers are going to get excited about.

GamesBeat: Do you guys still go outside for attribution partners?

Morris: Understanding your app installs across ad networks? That portion of analytics is in closed beta right now. We’re working on a couple of partners that we’re going to include. What we plan to do is provide a dashboard for you to look at all the attribution.