Last month we launched Experience Notifications, a new way for 13+ users to keep up with the most important moments in their favorite experiences through personalized notifications.
Today, we’re releasing a new Notification Permission Prompt API as a fast-follow to help you grow your notifiable audience. This new API allows you to prompt 13+ users to enable notifications for your experience from within the context of that experience.
Previously, users could only enable notifications outside of the experience through the “Notify” button on the experience details page. Now, with the Notification Permission Prompt API, users can enable notifications without having to leave the experience.
Like with the “Notify” button, enabling notifications from the permission prompt will opt 13+ users into both Experience Notifications and Experience Updates.
You can customize the triggering logic of the permission prompt to contextualize the value and use of notifications for your users.
Please note that this prompt will be limited to display once every 30 days for each user and will not be displayed if the user has already enabled notifications for your experience.
Please let us know if you have any feedback or questions. Thank you!
But, I’m worried that this may get misused somehow. Also I’m guessing that there’s a filtering and moderation before being able to publish a notification.
However, I am worried that some developers will make the trigger logic to make the prompt appear out of the blue. I believe that it would cause some players to be annoyed at it.
To whoever is saying that this feature will be abused, I think this issue is solved if you read this part:
also @raftwarz recently added an statement which explains why there is the 30 day limit
I don’t know why it would need a brand new service to do this when you can just put this in NotificationService so the service can have an actual use and reduces the need of having a whole new service for in-game notifications, but I do find this a good update
Hi @KingJesseDev, thanks for your question! The 30 day limit is in place by design to prevent developers from triggering this prompt too frequently, such as every time a user joins, but the user can always opt-in through the “Notify” button on the Experience Details Page.
Can this functionality be extended to prompting for users to “Favorite” the game. Currently it is being misused and spammed in experiences until you finally accept the prompt to favorite.
Thanks for adding this, super excited about the possibilities notifications bring and now being able to prompt in-game makes it even easier to get more users to see them.
It would be helpful if we could also get an API for requesting users to join groups. (This was promised many years ago but seems to have been forgotten)
Very nice. I do approve of this, however it seems like a feature only those cash grab simulators and obbys will use. I mean it could be used in regular games but that’s my take on it. Not saying it’s a bad feature, just clarifying.
Was thinking the exact same thing. Let people opt out please.
This is great for all sorts of bleak corporate statistics, but horrible UX. I’ve already had enough of the please favorite my game prompts, I don’t need another one.
YES YES YES YES YES!!! I am so happy to see many of the recent updates giving us creators more ways to interact with our community, outside of our game!
I’m so excited to see this new feature and appreciate the 30-day limit as well. Without the limit, I could easily see this being spammed to players and would eventually cause players to always decline notifications!
While I was typing that last paragraph, it gave me an idea. I feel like there’s a middle ground we could come to for still allowing the player to enable notifications within the experience. I’m not sure of any way this could be directly implemented as an API, but still prevent developers from abusing it.
I feel like a possible solution could be to add this option to the core settings / escape menu. I feel like that would only result in a better user experience, where they could easily toggle notifications while in an experience.
I imagine adding something to that menu might require jumping through a bunch of hoops or even another team working on it, so I don’t put much faith into it. Still very happy we got this functionality, thanks for the awesome work!
The decision to leave the triggering logic up to the developer was informed by our understanding that developers know their experience and audience best, and should therefore be able to determine the most effective context to prompt their users. As with all forms of in-experience pop-ups, we trust developers to know that it’s in the best interest of their overall engagement to avoid bothering their users with low-value prompts. This new prompt is no exception. Additionally, the 30 day limit is also in place to reduce these spam risks further.
I understand that this was done to prevent abuse, but this is absolutely insane, 30 days is enough time for a player to complete many games on the platform! This restriction should be heavily reduced; experiences can already purchase prompt users once every 30 seconds and that isn’t a problem because games that ‘abuse’ this also ruin player user-experience leading to less player counts and less recommendations.
