Threads explores games in conversations, starting with a basketball game. A Meta spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that the company is designing the prototype of the game internally and that it is not available to the public.
The game was first spotted by the reverse engineer Alessandro Palucciwho often find unreleased features while still in development. Paluzzi shared a screenshot of the basketball game, which appears to allow users to shoot virtual hoops by swiping. The idea behind the game is likely to allow friends to compete to see who can score the most baskets, similar to other mobile basketball games.
Releasing in-message games 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 Messages, which supports gaming through third-party apps like GamePigeon.
As with any internal prototype, it’s unknown when or if Meta plans to release official games in Threads messages.
It’s also worth noting that this isn’t the first time Meta has explored in-message games, as Instagram launched a hidden emoji game in DMs last year. The aim of the game is to use your finger to move the paddle at the bottom of the screen to keep an emoji of your choice on the surface and keep 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 with more topics, likely aiming to draw users away from Reddit and X. Plus, it added a “disappearing posts” feature that lets users 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 reach X in the US, according to data from The Pew Research Center report was released a few weeks ago. The report says 21% of US adults said they have used X, compared to just 8% who have used Threads and 4% who have used Bluesky.
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