1. Perspective on Web Game Tech from the Instant Games team
Chris Hawkins
Partner Engineer, Facebook
My name is Chris Hawkins
I am a Partner Engineer at Facebook
I work with developers to bring their games to the Instant Games platform
I’m mostly here to listen and learn, but it’s great to be kicking off today — hopefully I can help set some high level context, and after me we’ll hear more context from some of the developers themselves

2. Quick Intro to Instant Games
Facebook
JS BRIDGE
WEBVIEW
NATIVE
Game logic
Graphics
Audio
Input
(Hosted on our CDN)
Authentication
Ads
IAP
Platform UI (e.g. friend selector)
If you’re not familiar with Instant Games, Instant Games is an HTML5 gaming platform embedded in the Facebook app
Instant Games are HTML5 applications that communicate to the Facebook native app using message passing
All game logic, rendering and audio is in a regular webview
Message passing is used for anything involving user authentication, showing ads, payments and some platform Uis
This model gives us the versatility of HTML5 content, but with a platform level understanding of semantics that enable us to infer (for example) when a session has ended

3. Our Goals Problems we want to solve Problems we would like help with
Instant Games need to be able to monetize effectively
Instant Games should be able to tap into a social network in order to be played together
Instant Games should be developed by trusted developers and be positive experiences for players
High game fidelity is harder to achieve on Instant Games (graphics, input)
Battery life, crashing issues, performance
Protecting assets in developer’s games
On our platform there are problems that we want to tackle, like monetization for Instant Game developers
We also want to build compelling social features, so that gamers can play together
And we want to ensure platform trust, so that we’re seen as a high quality and trustworthy library of gaming content
But what I’d like to talk about today are some of the areas where we need help:
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Specifically, building high fidelity games in HTML5 is harder than native. The tools are not yet as good, and the technology is hampered (often for good reasons, like safety and security).
Battery life, crashes and performance are all key concerns, as are IP issues, as the web makes it easy to lift content
Note that Instant Games is a predominately mobile platform, so my comments are largely filtered through that lense

4. Notable issues for Instant Game developers
Device capabilities are difficult to infer, which makes crashes more likely (e.g. out of memory)
Webviews aren’t at feature parity with browsers (web workers, getUserMedia)
IP protection for game developers (assets are more easily stolen from web games)
Caching and loading game assets intelligently
WASM mobile support and tooling for debugging
One of the challenges that we’ve specifically discussed with developers is the challenge of adapting games to lower-end devices
Whether for connection reasons or memory reasons, it’s often desirable to load lower quality assets, and it would be great to know when
Instant Games causes a statistically significant increase in crashes in the Facebook app, and many of these come from the webview implementation or out of memory errors
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As a mobile platform embedded in an app, we rely pretty extensively on webviews, but they aren’t as good as a browser
There are specific areas where webviews are not at parity with the system browser, including web workers (which we would love to enable to our developer community) and APIs that enable new types of gameplay, such as getUserMedia
The openness of the web also makes it easy to copy, and we frequently see entire HTML5 games from our platform downloaded and cloned, tweaked slightly and re-uploaded
Getting to zero theft of assets is a fool’s errand — at a minimum there will always be screenshots — but it would be great to explore what can be done here
We know from our data that users frequently churn from games while they’re loading, and it would be great to get smarter about when game assets are loaded and how they’re cached
Finally, Web Assembly is a really promising technology we’re super excited about, but as we’ll no-doubt hear from many devs today, it’s hard to debug

5. Questions? chrishawkins@fb.com
Thanks for listening to this short presentation
I’m happy to take any questions you have about the platform, or any experiments we’ve run, just come find me over the course of the workshop, or me at this address