Facebook acquired the famous VR headset company Oculus for $2 billion to add to its gaming portfolio a while ago. Now Facebook is going to launch a full on PC-dedicated gaming platform today signalling that it wants to compete with the likes of Steam and provide competition to mobile gaming on iOS and Android.
A “Unity” based approach
The new gaming platform, which will be available on web as well as desktop, will be mostly focusing on developers which make use of the very common Unity game engine. Although the first project under the new partnership will be developer centric for the most part, it will have a direct impact on the Facebook users playing games on Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg and others report it as a new export feature added to the Unity engine which can allow a development studio to publish their games directly on Facebook and to Facebook’s new gaming platform “with very little effort and few code changes”.
Unity’s VP of business development, Elliot Solomon said in a press release that,
Integrating tools that provide effortless access to Facebook’s network is a key part of helping developers find the success they deserve
Famous games and VR apps coming soon
For starters Unity engine itself is free to use and a widely popular tool which has been used for a number of famous game titles such as Superhot, Ori and the Blind Forest, Kerbal Space Program, Firewatch and Alto’s Adventure.
Those games could be ported to Facebook’s new gaming platform with small changes and little effort from their respective developers, at least in theory. On top of that there are also a lot of VR apps that are powered by the Unity engine which could be added to the gaming platform.
It would be a natural fit considering that Facebook owns Oculus VR as well, for which the company would sooner or later need to sell apps and games, and a gaming platform will facilitate that. The social network company paid the web-game developers $2.5 billion last year and there are more than 650 million people on its gaming network. In comparison, Steam has around 125 million monthly users.
Facebook is holding a close alpha test of the new work environment currently, with applications to join available until August 31st.
To use this money against Muslims. Good idea Israel.