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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.
Ugh, I'm blowing mods to post this but it has to be known more broadly: Unity is already spyware and has been for a while. Analytics is integrated into the editor, and while it used to be opt-out ever since Unity 5.0 it's been impossible for free users to disable. (Pro users still? have that option) Additionally, any games that you make with Unity also spy on your customers, even if you don't include Unity analytics or Unity ads. Naturally, if you do include those things your games will collect even more information, and Unity will graciously share some of that information with you, but it's not possible to make a spyware-free game with Unity.
In that respect, this seems like a savvy pairing between companies.