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Facebook Officially Announces Gameroom, Its PC Steam Competitor (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: After losing mobile gaming to iOS and Android, Facebook is making a big push into playing on PC with today's developer launch of its Gameroom Windows desktop gaming platform. After months of name changes, beta tests and dev solicitation, Facebook opened up the beta build for all developers and officially named it Gameroom. The app is openly available for users to download on Windows 7 and up. Gameroom let users play web, ported mobile and native Gameroom games in a dedicated PC app free from the distractions of the News Feed. Gameroom will have to fight a steep uphill battle again Valve's Steam platform, which has well over 125 million active users, with millions actually playing at any given moment. Facebook will need to convince developers that Gameroom will share its social network's massive reach and is therefore worth their while. Then it will have to persuade gamers that a more social experience is worth diving into a new platform. If Facebook succeeds, there are plenty of potential benefits to owning a gaming destination. Facebook announced the launch and name change from "Facebook Games Arcade" today at Unity's game development platform conference. Unity 5.6 shipping next year will allow devs to export their games directly to Facebook Gameroom, as well as to the WebGL standard. Facebook's director of global games platform, Leo Olebe, touted how Facebook will feature new games in the Gameroom to give developers a leg up.
And we trust Facebook even more than Origin and UPlay! Only thing I'm worried about - does Facebook have enough clout to get real 'exclusives'? The only reason Origin has traction is because of exclusives (Mass Effect, Battlefield games, etc) and UPlay used to force install with games bought on Steam (I think I had to have it installed to play Driver). EA/Origin also produce the games themselves, so they have a lot more clout in restricting them to certain delivery platforms.
That's exactly what I want. My real name associated with the games I play, and have ads tailored to me based upon any games I play.
I only have steam because I have to. I refuse to install anything that requires Origin or UPlay- I sure as fudge won't install Facegames! I don't care if they get exclusive games, I've never been the sort to fall for peer pressure. "Oh you have to play this game that's only on Origin"- no I really don't. There are plenty of games on Steam. More games than I'll ever get around to playing. Exclusives are for idiots.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
They already have them, but they're not extracting money from them; Zynga and their ilk are. This is a plan to get a hold of the revenue streams that currently goes to Zynga et al.