Facebook has hit a new milestone that indicates just how large its community of gamers has become: 800 million monthly active users. That number includes the people who play games on Facebook, but it also includes those who are merely logged in to Facebook while playing games on other platforms, such as smartphones.
Leo Olebe, the director of global games partnerships at Facebook, told GamesBeat in an interview this week that the number is up from 650 million a month. That’s a pretty big slice of the 1.86 billion people who connect on Facebook every month. Facebook is disclosing the numbers at this week’s F8 event (Facebook’s annual developer event).
This 800 million includes people who play Instant Games, or games based on the HTML5 format on Messenger and Facebook news feeds. And while it isn’t a great indicator about how many people play directly on Facebook, it is a good proxy for the whole community of gamers.
“Our vision is to be the world’s community for people to play, watch, and share games,” Olebe said.