In any industry, you will find companies strive to be singled out due to a specific service they offer and the social networking industry is no different. Since they all offer rather the same service of connecting people, differentiation is necessary and Snapchat does this well.
Ever since they introduced Lenses, their Augmented Reality masks, they have become a popular choice for their close to 160 million daily active users. They are usually updated regularly and are as random as they come.
However it seems now Snap wants to take this idea forward where they want people to play games within Snapchat, but within Lenses.
According to the Wired, these new Lenses are called Snappables. These new lenses will allow people to do such things like add friends to a rock band, challenge them to an emoji dance off or even play basketball. They will be able to interact with these AR games through facial expression, motion or touch, which sounds rather cool.
Sure adding AR games might seem like a cool way to keep the existing user base more engaged on Snapchat, but they still have problems. Snapchat recently made a drastic user interface change that angered users (even some celebrities commented on it). Also the continued onslaught from Instagram made Instagram Stories a viable option for people who used Snapchat Stories.
This could be a great way to make sure that Snap still makes Snapchat look cool and appeal to advertisers due to the increased time spent on the platforms. We will have to wait and see how Instagram will counter this in the AR front, although the latter is yet to be at the same level in offering AR features as Snapchat.
