Facebook Launches New Platform Gameroom

Own the Room.

By Vikki Blake

Facebook has launched Gameroom, its new gaming platform.

Originally called Facebook Games Arcade, Facebook announced the name change, and the rollout of its new desktop app, at Unity's game development platform conference.

Image credit: developers.facebook.com

The platform - which is suitable for Windows 7 and upwards and is available now in beta for both developers and users - will allow Unity developers to export games directly into it.

Facebook describes Gameroom as "ensuring an exclusive and immersive gaming experience", stating its games perform better in terms of "app launch timings and memory consumption", and "developing in Facebook Gameroom natively takes less time: it's easier compared to HTML5 and gives better solutions around threading, debugging, networking and memory management".

While developers can create games with a Mac, they will not be able to run them - the client is currently is only available on Windows.

Image credit: developers.facebook.com

"Today we're announcing that Facebook support for Unity is now available in the Gameroom developer beta, and that Facebook support will ship as part of Unity 5.6 early next year," writes Sheree Lee on the Facebook developer page.

"With Facebook Gameroom, Facebook is introducing an easier way for developers to bring high-quality games to the PC to take full advantage of the CPU and GPU native power. The Facebook build target lets you deploy your projects to either the new Gameroom desktop app for Windows as a native Windows player, or to Facebook.com using Unity’s WebGL support."

Gameroom could be a response to the declining use of its browser games following the expansion of the mobile game market. According to TechCrunch, although Facebook can "earn up to 30 percent revenue cut on payments in games", the size of games remains modest, with a cap at just 200MB (although it will "consider" games up to 500MB on a case-by-case basis).

Developers can also add a "payment solution" to games by way of in-app purchases and in-game currency.

Tempted to try it out?

Facebook bought Oculus VR for a reported 2 billion dollars in March 2014. The reported acquisition deal included 400 million USD in cash and 1.6 billion in Facebook stock, and granted Facebook ownership of the Oculus Rift virtual reality gaming technology.

Vikki Blake is a very jumpy survival horror survivalist. You can find her twittering over at @_vixx and twitching at twitch.tv/vixxiie.

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