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Facebook Teams Up With Unity To Create a Gaming Platform To Rival Steam (betanews.com)
Facebook is now shifting its attention back to capturing the gaming market. The company said Thursday that it's working with game engine Unity to build a dedicated, downloadable desktop gaming platform. The social juggernaut added that it is also broadening the Facebook.com experience for gamers. BetaNews reports: Facebook is starting to take gaming far more seriously. Not content with funneling the likes of Candy Crush through its servers, the social network is now joining forces with the company behind the Unity game engine to create its own desktop gaming platform. The aim is to tap into not only the millions of gamers that are already on Facebook, but also to gather more from the PC-gaming community. It's a new venture that very clearly treads on the toes of Steam, and is likely to cause ripples in the gaming world. The scope of the work between Facebook and Unity Technologies is quite wide. It will bring together Unity's 2D, 3D, VR and AR development platform with Facebook's own game development tools. While Facebook is currently associated with very casual gaming, hooking up with an established serious player in the field means we're likely to see the social network appealing more to hardcore gamers.
Farmville on every platform!
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Don't want.
-Glorious PC Master Race
Since when is Steam a gaming platform? I do wish Valve would start making new games again.
Like when Facebook had games and eventually took over all the ad space the developers had to finance their games?
Like when they suddenly banned all their developers from billing their own customers?
Like when they were giving away facebook credits and making developers pick up the tab?
For some reason I think I'll give this a big ol' pass.
You'd have to be pretty dumb at this point to think Facebook wouldn't steal all the profit.
Any venture that is based on trust will ultimately fail when facebook is involved. They squandered the trust of users a very long time go.
Besides the fact that Unity is going to join up with them, isn't this already available now? Personally, I still use GOG whenever possible as they have my respect for not crippling games with DRM.
They are trying to make a new platform to be better than the one platform that have been dominating for 13 years... good luck!
It's all well and good that they want to try, but they've got several factors working against them:
1. Facebook is already synonymous with casual Bejeweled clones and management timesinks
2. Unity is known mostly as a cheap engine for middling-to-low tier casual games and a few indies
3. They simply don't have the library
Number 3 is what will hurt them the most. As it stands, Steam's got a massive library of titles including the latest & greatest as well as loads of classic games. Unless Facebook plans to tap some big name developers to create exclusive content for their platform, most people aren't going to stop using Steam/Origin/Battle.net for their games. And even then, if people actually wanted it, most games already have facebook integration crap anyway.
Unity seemed alright until this. The very last thing I want in the digital world is Facebook anything. Just replace "Facebook" with "spyware/adware" and you have a much clearer picture of what it actually is.
There goes Unity. It has been fun while it lasted.
Look forward to getting interrupted gaming by an advert :)
Hahahahah
Good luck with that. If there's one thing Facebook does not comprehend it's the hardcore gaming market. Steam and social media are not the same thing. Gamers aren't into social media. Gamers don't desire Farmville, they don't want microtransactions every 5 seconds, and they damn sure don't want your shitty ads inserted into their experience or their mom interrupting their session with a new wall update.
Trying to compete with actual gamers (Steam) in their own market is going to end up an embarrassing spectacle that will only screw over the poor fools that actually invest in the service during the 4 years that it will operate.
everyone says they won't use it
because nobody will.
also inb4 fuck facebook.
Why do people willingly sign up to a multilevel marketing company? It's absurd.
I barely use facebook as it is and am vehemently opposed to the data scraping and such it does for everything that is put on their servers. I'll be damned if I'm going to let them datamine my gaming habits too. At least with Steam it seems they categorize and time, "You like FPS's? RPGs? you might like these..." and reviews note time played. Beyond that, they don't care.
I can only imagine what sort of crap Facebook will add in the name of "features" for this sort of thing.
I just want to point out that Facebook does have a 'real' game studio now with published titles and many more in the pipeline. Further they have John Carmack and Abrash in-house. Love or hate Facebook, they now have to tools to make some extraordinary moves in gaming. We are way beyond Farmville here. This is a big announcement.
Good-bye
atm you are waging a war with some horrendously convoluted HTML+CSS just to stop people who don't want to see ads from not seeing ads.
This means small businesses enjoy the blowback of ill will as their ads get displayed to people who don't want to see ads.
And it pisses off Facebook users, of course.
I don't want anyone with your mindset anywhere near gaming, thanks, Facebook. You carry on acting as a social hub for Farmville.
Dammit. I like Unity a *lot* and it is very handy to have around for fun and experiments. FBook snapping it up sucks, I don't want their hooks in my hobbies.
There's value in having all your games on a single distribution platform, and I'm already annoyed by having to put up with Origin and UPlay. Adding another crappy little distribution platform is not going to help anyone but maybe Facebook.
facebook has done a good job of destroying user trust, so i don't think people are looking to become more entwined with them than they already are. it's one thing to betray users when you have a leading platform and people are being to driven to rely on you but it's quite another to be known as betraying users when you are trying to build a new platform.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
There have actually been a lot of competitors in this space. EA dropped Steam in favour of Origin, and of course MS is pushing the app store. So far though, Steam has been the top dog, likely in part because they offer the best service (note I won't say perfect service, as they still have issues, but still a lot better than the competition). Steam has also made progress is offering more features, such as the ability to play games from a non-logged-in account on an authorised PC (with a different account logged in).
Their "consoles" don't seem to be making huge headway, but the Steam platform itself I expect will be going strong for some time now.
...before I will ever use any Facebook service. Ever.
Sure bring on the competition, it will be a good for Steam. I'd prefer a third party but we all know by now that capitalism devolves to a dual monopoly. Facebook will be the Microsoft of the online gaming world, and Steam will be the Apple.
But, I need to log into Facebook to play a game? They already want me to log in to post comments on news articles, to participate in the local railroad club or RPG community, or increasingly to gain access to assorted websites. They want Facebook to be the "universal login to the internet." I can swallow logging into Steam, because they don't have their slimy tentacles connected to everything else.
So nope, I won't play. Gaming is not that important to me, and I certainly don't need TWO Steams eating my hard disk and chugging CPU cycles.
Google is intrusive enough but somehow they don't feel as skanky as Facebook. Google is an over-eager octopus, but Facebook crosses the line into hentai. In theory they are the same thing and I should be equally concerned with both, but they sure don't feel the same. Maybe it's Zuckerberg's smarmy grin.
Facebook serious is an oxymoron. Steam is digital download king and Valve is loved. I gave up on EA when they took their games off Steam.
If games are not available on Valve's Steam or GoG.com then it really doesn't exist to me, my family, or my friends.
I don't think Valve has an iota of fear either. Pfft.
When you consider that facebook has taken steps to force more ads on their users despite knowing that users don't want them and will actively go out of their way to reduce them, I wouldn't trust them.
Facebook also changes users settings very often. Just one small example, I have to reset my feed back to newest first on average 3 times a day, and that's not the only setting they screw with, though the others are either less frequently, or I don't notice it as often. Because of that, I wouldn't trust them.
Their platform isn't as stable or concise as it might appear to a single use as they 'test' different components on different uses, and don't tell anyone what version of which component they have. This would be horrible in a store platform, so I wouldn't trust them.
Facebook has done social/psych experiments on the users without their knowledge or permission. Though it may have been useful to some segments of science, it still was inappropriate and is a further violation of trust, so obviously, I wouldn't trust them.
The long and the short of it is that Facebook can't be trusted.
A store platform by a company that has ethics as low as Facebook should be trusted even less as that deals with your money.
This is likely to be a disaster in the making.
In a perfect world, game developers would make the best games they could and sell directly to the player via open source software and hardware platforms. No Xbox/Sony gatekeeping, no Steam/Origin/FB middleman. Just the developers and the players.
One can dream...
Facebook is a US government spy operation that works directly with Israel, yet the FBI moles employed there share your information internatinally.
So yeah, more games-bait like Windows.
c'mon you have to use our spyware, we have gamez!!
No innovation, invasive like a parasite, and extremely late to the game. So it uses it's cash hoard to buy others to try to sway the public to use it's horribly bad product.
Has facebook ever innovated anything? As far as I know they are a Jewish/Ashkenazi/Zionist operation who have used the United States Media who they completely own to push facebook in your face and for you to use . This is why the 100 of alternatives to facebook failed - the zionist media getting behind 1 platform to own you.
My favorite game is "Luddite Quest 2: The App of Truth"
As long as FB maintains their real name policy, FB integration is a deal breaker for pretty much anything with me.
Now Valve will be punished for SteamOS and Vulkan.
Microsoft doing what it does best: leveraging monopoly influence.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
If someone tags a picture as offensive, Facebook might delete your account. That happened to a friend of mine when she posted a slightly racy picture for breast cancer awareness month. I couldn't imagine wanting all my game purchases tied to my facebook login.
I dub thee SteamFace!!
Soandso has asked you for more gems in Team Fortress Facebook Edition!
nope nope nope nopity nope
I can't wait to hear the rant Tim Sweeney goes on when he hears this. The only gaming store he hasn't insinuated is evil is Steam, and that's probably because he knows that's a loosing battle. I wonder how much money Epic has spent to develop their Epic Games Launcher.
Gaben the mighty will smite thee