You can now play games with friends inside of Snapchat

Snapchat just made its gaming platform official.

The company unveiled its long-rumored gaming feature, Snap Games, at its Partner Summit event in Los Angeles. There are six games starting to roll out to the app now, including 

One of the games, Bitmoji Party, was created internally at Snap. As the name suggests, the game pits your Bitmoji against your friends’ in a series of short minigames. The other five games were created by outside developers and are only available in Snapchat, the company said.

Snapchat’s games are part of its messaging features, and friends or groups of friends can start a game from within a message thread by tapping on the new rocket ship icon in the app. When you start a game, the other people in the thread will get a notification alerting them they can join (you can also play some games solo). 

The overall concept is similar to what Facebook did with Instant Games inside of Messenger. Like those games, Snapchat’s new titles are all relatively simple HTML5 games. One key differentiator though, according to Snap execs, is that Snapchat’s games are all played live in real time and feature live text and audio chat. So while your Bitmoji is duking it out with your friends’ Bitmoji, you can text and chat as you play. 

In theory, this could help Snap appeal to fans of other popular multiplayer games like Fortnite, a game hugely popular with a similar demographic as Snapchat. There are even two battle royale-style games among the first batch of developer titles, which is a telling sign of exactly who Snap expects will be playing. (Snake Squad, a multiplayer snake game that sounds a bit like Slither.io, and Tiny Royale, Zynga’s miniaturized take on the genre, where each battle is only two minutes long.)

Snap’s announcement comes on the heels of new gaming services from Apple (with Arcade) and Google (with Stadia), neither of which have launched. But while those services hope to win over users with well-known titles and premium features, Snap Games is meant to keep participants inside Snapchat by tying casual games to the conversations they’re already having. It’s not a new formula by any means but, if done right, it could help provide an engagement boost among the app’s most important users.