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📂 **Category**: Apps,Social,Meta,Threads
📌 **What You’ll Learn**:
Threads explores games in chats, starting with basketball. A Meta spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that the company is prototyping the game internally and that it is not available to the public.
The game was first discovered by reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi, who would often find unreleased features while still in development. Paluzzi shared a screenshot of the basketball game, which appears to let users actually shoot hoops by swiping their finger. The idea behind the game will likely allow friends to compete to see who can score the most baskets, similar to other mobile basketball games.
Launching games within Messages would give Threads an advantage over competitors like X and Bluesky, which don’t offer built-in games. It could also help Threads compete with Apple’s Threads, which supports gaming via third-party apps like GamePigeon.
As with any internal prototype, it’s unknown when or if Meta plans to officially release the games in Threads.
It’s also worth noting that this isn’t the first time Meta has explored games within messages, as Instagram launched a hidden emoji game in direct messages last year. The goal of the game is to use your finger to move the paddle at the bottom of the screen to keep the emoji of your choice afloat and constantly bouncing. If you let the emoji fall, you lose. The idea is to compete with the other person in the chat to achieve the highest score.
The internal prototype comes as Meta continues to build Threads with new features to take on its competitors. For example, the platform recently expanded its Communities feature by adding more topics, aiming to lure users away from Reddit and X. Additionally, it has added a “Disappearing Posts” feature that allows users to share their thoughts and participate in conversations that are automatically archived after 24 hours.
While Threads has 400 million monthly users, it still has a long way to go to catch up with X in the US, according to data from a Pew Research Center report released a few weeks ago. The report says that 21% of US adults said they used X, compared to just 8% who used Threads, and 4% who used Bluesky.
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