You can now play games inside the Snapchat app with friends

Last month, there was a report that Snapchat was going to introduce a gaming platform in the app. Well, good news, Snapchat has finally made the gaming platform official. Snap Inc. launched the gaming feature inside of the Snapchat app its Partner Summit event in Los Angeles.

The gaming feature called Snap Games, for now, is starting with only 6 games. Out of the 6 games, only one was created internally at Snap — Bitmoji Party. The Bitmoji Party game sets your Bitmoji against your friends’ in a series of short minigames.

The rest of the games were developed by outside developers. They are available in the Snapchat app only, so says the company.

Snap Games is part of Snapchat’s messaging features. Friends or groups of friends can even start a game right from a message thread. There is a new rocket ship icon in the app, you tap on it and you have some games to play.

When a game is started from within a message thread, your friends in the thread will get a notification that they can join. This doesn’t mean all the games are played with a group. You can as well play some games solo.

Facebook has a gaming feature called Instant Games in the Messenger app, and Snapchat’s gaming concept is quite similar to it. But there is one key difference between Facebook’s Instant Game and Snapchat’s Snap Games. Unlike Instant Games, Snapchat’s games are all played live in real time.

Another feature of Snap Games is, it features live text and audio chat. This means you can text and chat while you still play the game.

The concept of Snap Games is to appeal to multiplayer games (like Fortnite) lovers. Snap Games even has two battle royale-style games in the first 6 games. One is Snake Squad, a multiplayer snake game, and the other is Tiny Royale. In Tiny Royale, each battle is only two minutes long.

Snap Inc. is doing this to boost engagement among the app’s most important users and retain users as well. So just update your Snapchat app and when you see the rocket ship icon, you are eligible to play.