By Angela Moon
(Reuters) - Snap Inc on Thursday launched a gaming platform within its Snapchat app featuring original and third-party games such as Zynga Inc's Tiny Royale, aiming to keep existing users engaged longer and attract new ones.
Snap also announced a slew of fresh features and content for existing products, adding shows from Bunim/Murray Productions and BuzzFeed as well as augmented reality filters to include templates of landmarks.
Snap made the announcement at its first-ever Partner Summit in Los Angeles, unveiling features and content aimed at keeping its core base of 13-34-year-olds on its messaging platform longer even as overall user growth has stalled.
Snap faces fierce competition for users and advertisers from bigger and far better-financed rivals like Facebook Inc, whose namesake platform and Instagram photo-sharing app have successfully copied popular Snapchat features like Stories - a personal feed of photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours.
In 2018, Instagram had about 400 million daily active users on its version of Stories, more than twice Snapchat's daily users.
Snap must also battle for user attention against newer rivals like TikTok, a short-form video app owned by Chinese tech company Bytedance.
The number of daily active users on Snapchat has held steady or fallen for the past several quarters, but the app is still wildly popular among young users.
Snapchat reaches 75 percent of 13-34 year olds and 90 percent of 13-24 year olds in the United States.
"We wanted to build something that makes us feel like we're playing a board game with family over a long holiday weekend," said Will Wu, director of Product at Snap told creators and developers at the one-day, invite-only event.
"Something that makes us feel like we're sitting with friends, controllers in hand, looking at the same screen."
The games include Snap's flagship Bitmoji Party, Spry Fox's Alphabear Hustle, ZeptoLab's C.A.T.S. Drift Race, Game Closure's Snake Squad, PikPok's Zombie Rescue Squad and Zynga's Tiny Royale, and can be played from Snapchat's main "Chat" messaging feature.
Snap said the gaming platform will have non-skippable, six-second video ads, a relatively new format that helped the company's revenue growth in the fourth quarter.
Snap also launched new augmented reality "lenses," or filters that overlay video, including templates of landmarks like the Buckingham Palace in London, the Capitol Building in Washington D.C., and the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
As part of Snap's push to expose more of its content outside of the platform, the company also launched "App Stories" with partners like Tinder which would allow users to update their dating profiles with Snapchat Stories.
(Reporting by Angela Moon; Editingby Meredith Mazzilli)