Facebook Instant Games hits Personality Quizzes with the Ban Hammer

As of yesterday apps defined as personality quizzes on Facebook Instant Games have been limited to prevent their virality, which is basically the death knell for these self gratification apps. If you have written one of these apps (like me) then how will the changes affect your app? You will no longer have access to the users profile photo, their connected friends or the ability to switch to any of your other apps. As these apps rely heavily on the users profile picture being heavily featured to personalise the content it makes these apps even more useless than they were previously.

Its sad news, but developers have been enraged by these personality quiz apps appearing on Instant Games and polluting the very idea behind Instant Games. That said, there should be a place for personality quiz apps because there is huge demand for them, so please Facebook, create an Instant Apps :).

One major positive that has come out of this is that the many developers filling their personality quiz apps with unlicensed imagery will finally stop profiting off the back of other peoples work! For that reason alone it also time for celebration.

Whilst the title says “ban hammer”, I was being being a little creative. These apps are not currently banned, however Facebook are updating their policies to get rid of them, so they will be banned in due course.

Facebook Instant Game Tutorials Live

Spent some spare time over the last few weeks noting down information that I do not want to forget regarding Facebook Instant Games development. I’ve been away from it for a bit and plan to spend more time away from it so want a nice easy reference for when I return.

I decided to turn my notes into a bunch of Facebook Instant Game tutorials to help other budding game developers out there.

You can read the tutorials here.

The individual links to each are:

I will cover more topics when I return.

Facebook Instant Games gets its first hard core porn app!

Its well known in the Facebook Instant Game developer community that Facebook Instant Games is a bit of a wild west. In the beginning god created…, just kidding :D. In the beginning some developers were taking well known web games and just dumping them onto IG to earn a quick buck, eventually the copyright holders arrived to the platform and got many of them taken down.

After this phase of stupidity, along came blatant ripping off of well known IP such as Pokemon, Mario, PUBG, Minecraft etc.., this is still prevalent today. You would think this would be limited to just small developers that don’t have much to lose if sued, but unfortunately it is not. The top app on Facebook Instant Games is called OMG, with around 130 million users and it uses well known questionable imagery from many movies, stars and musicians. Facebook however adopt the position that it is ok to use copyrighted materials and will not remove games and apps that use them unless the copyright holders complain.

Today Facebook Instant Games took a new turn with the arrival of Huber, which is basically a hard core porn version of OMG. I’m not against porn, but I am against it ending up in the hands of young kids. The app should really be restricted to 18+ but a fellow developer confirmed that it is searchable from their child’s phone.

The big question is, how did a hard core porn app make it through the Facebook Instant Games review process without an 18 restriction slapped on it? Well, very little is known about the review process, we have no idea if the process is done by AI or humans so who knows. The issue with the Facebook Instant Games review process is you submit an app or game with relatively harmless material but can change the material after the review process. Many of these OMG style apps host the visual content on their server with the Facebook or Messenger app basically acting as a web browser. This enables the developer to change the content on their server at any point in time with no review process. So basically its very easy to circumvent the review process.

Hopefully Facebook pull up their socks and slap an 18+ on this app and any others like it so kiddies can’t get a hold of it.

How can this issue be resolved? It can be resolved very easily by blocking access to external imagery so that all imagery has to be included with the zip file when the app is submitted to Facebook Instant Games. In addition, app updates will likely have to be reviewed for new developers. Existing developers that have developed a level of trust should be able to bypass the update review process.