Look, as a huge PC gamer I thought this was a joke too. I review and talk about games as a huge portion of my life, so trust me when I tell you there are far too many Steam clones out there. We have EA’s Origin, UbiSoft‘s UPLay, GoG Galaxy, Battle.net and the list goes on and on. The last thing I need/want is another launcher cluttering my taskbar.
But Facebook is in a bit of a pickle as of late. No, not that one your thinking about, or that other one (Facebook has a lot of problems festering), but this one is about gaming. Facebook used to be the one place to go for the casual game space (Farmville, anyone?), but the company has seen much of it’s money-making base move onto mobile devices.
Now the social media company is making a play to bring back some of those people with its new Gameroom service. Gameroom is a Windows desktop gaming platform that has just opened its beta build for any developer that wants to give it a shot.
What’s actually neat about the platform is that it along with allowing users to play games native to the platform, but more importantly it will allow developers the ability to port mobile games for play on the PC. Steam has experimented with this (for better or for worse) and there is clearly a market to be had.
That said, it will be no small feat to take on the mountain that is Steam and its over 100 million active users. To make this work Facebook is going to have to court numerous developers and give them some incentive to getting their stuff up on the platform.
Facebook used to have a huge gaming business a few years back when it was the destination for all those games that made you bug your friends for stuff. Hate them if you will (I sure did) that venture brought in a lot on money and Facebook would like to see it do so again.
One big get that Facebook has as of today is with Unity 5.6. The game design engine launches next year and will let developers export their game directly to Facebook’s new Gameroom. This means that it should be quite easy to get your games on the platform, but this also means that we’ll probably see 8000 walking simulators.
Gameroom may not nab those hardcore gamers, but if the can bring back some of that mobile folks they have lost, then this new little venture could pay off for them. I’m just not all that excited about installing a new games portal.
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