You can now play 'Pac-Man' and 'Space Invaders' in Facebook Messenger

Games are officially becoming part of Messenger.

Facebook is adding a suite of new "Instant Games" to its messaging app, the company announced Tuesday. The games include well-known titles like Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Words With Friends as well as games from indie developers.

Rolling out now in 30 countries, you can find the games under the game controller icon. Once you start a game in a chat, others in the conversation will see that you played and can try to beat your score.

Facebook has dubbed them "Instant Games" because they load almost instantaneously (you don't need to download a separate app or complete any other steps before you start playing.)

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

For now, the feature includes a handful of games from a mix of developers. But the company says it plans to open up its game-specific platform to more parties in the future. Most of the games aren't competitive in and of themselves, but the hope is that automatic score sharing will help boost engagement as friends try to outdo each other.

While in many ways games seem like the next logical step for the steadily growing Messenger ecosystem, mini web-based games aren't necessarily what most people want in an app that is still primarily used for text chats. Yet Facebook's head of Messenger, David Marcus, says the success of previous experiments proved games could have a place in the app.

"We now know that gaming can be a popular thing on Messenger based on our little experiments with soccer and basketball," Marcus tells Mashable. Messenger's first game, a simple but addictive basketball game, has been played more than a billion times since it launched in March, according to the company.