Telegram Messaging Service Launches Bot-Powered Gaming Platform

Popular messaging app Telegram today announced the launch of a bot-powered gaming platform that enables users to play games right inside their chats.

Last year we launched a Bot Platform for Telegram. Free, powerful, and open, it was an instant hit among users and developers. Today we are aiming to push the boundaries further by launching a bot-powered Gaming Platform on Telegram. That’s right: you can now use bots to play games in your chats, complete with graphics and sound.

The company promises 'hundreds of games' are heading for the messaging service, but around 30 are ready to go live, many of them published by developer platform gamee. Games can be anything from simple arcades and puzzles to multiplayer 3D-shooters and real-time strategy games.

Users can start a game by interacting with a chat bot, either directly or by invoking a bot from an existing conversation thread using the @gamee alias. Gamers are also able to challenge friends on the Telegram service and start up competitions across existing chats, with high scores saved and updated for every game played in a thread and gamers notified if they get overtaken in a leaderboard.

Telegram is promoting the idea of users building their own games, which it calls 'easy', and reckons some can be created in a matter of hours. The technology powering the games is HTML5, so they're loaded on-demand like ordinary web pages and therefore take up zero space on the host device.

To be able to play the games, users will need to update their apps to version 3.13, which should roll out on the App Store store today. Telegram is a free download for iPhone and iPad. [Direct Link]

Tags: Chat Bots, Telegram

Top Rated Comments

Carlanga

113 months ago

Virtually everyone I know now uses Telegram. The poll bot is brilliant fun!

Cool, but for me virtually no one I know uses Telegram.

Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)

iosiseasy

It's been an uphill battle, but majority of my friends use Telegram, also my family and grandmother (She doesn't have a phone so she uses it on her computer). Once people start using it, they see how easy and quick it is. I find that sending pictures on iMessage is incredibly slow. Now that iMessage is caught up with stickers I was hoping it would at least be comparable, but iMessage is now feeling very cluttered and gimmicky. Plus, conversations don't take up any space on the phone, it is all cloud based which is awesome. I also use the broadcast system and have created some bots that send out alerts for my condo that allow security to send notifications to people when visitor parking is full, garbage chute is clogged or elevator is down. Pretty awesome. Sounds like I work for them, but I'm just one of the first users.

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