Gameroom

You guys are not understanding this at all. Flash and Unity webplayer plugins are being blocked by browsers now. Flash still works for the most part, but Unity doesn&#x27;t. Facebook is losing game players because of this, and new games are being built in Unity and not Flash, so it&#x27;s harder for them to launch on Facebook.<p>This solves that problem by letting you compile your game for Facebook Gameroom straight from the Unity editor, and supports the Unity in app purchase plugin. So now that mobile game that you just built can easily launch on Facebook too with very little effort.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.facebook.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;post&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;01&#x2F;unity-editor-beta&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.facebook.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;post&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;01&#x2F;unity-e...</a><p>Html5 &#x2F; WebGL is not an option. It&#x27;s super super slow and doesn&#x27;t even work for half your players. Until web assembly is live and has good adoption, this Facebook Gameroom thing is going to be the best bet for launching your Unity game on Facebook.<p>Big studios can afford to develop Flash versions of their Unity mobile games just for Facebook, but small studios can&#x27;t. So this is also great for that, to level the playing field a bit.<p>Edit: I&#x27;m actually fairly excited about this. We have a bunch of Unity mobile games out there but have launched none of them on Facebook because of the bullshit with the webplayer plugin and how terrible the WebGL stuff is right now. Now we can finally launch on Facebook! This is awesome for small Unity studios. Very very awesome.<p>I can also say with good confidence that not many people commenting are the target market here. You already have steam installed and you play games through that? Probably not the target market. If you play a ton of freemium games on your phone and&#x2F;or you used to play freemium Flash games on Facebook - <i>you</i> are the demographic for Gameroom.

I don&#x27;t think Facebook ever grokked the concept of multiple personas - LinkedIn is for my work persona, Steam (and Origin, Twitch etc) is for my gaming persona, and on Twitter I can have different accounts for each.<p>As long as Facebook requires a single account with real identity, it will never be anything more than for my family &amp; acquaintances persona. Most gamers I know feel the same... maybe we&#x27;re in the minority, but maybe not. Be interesting to know how many Steam accounts are linked with Facebook as an indication of how this might play out (aside from the potential for exclusive titles etc).

How infuriatingly presumptious. The page has a single screenshot, a meaningless blurb, and an an &quot;install now&quot; button - as if I&#x27;m going to automatically download and install every single thing Facebook announces.<p>How about even a bare-minimum attempt at explaining what this is all about? (I mean, yes, I know how to google and figure it out, but should I have to?)

They rebranded!<p>This was previously &#x27;Facebook Games Arcade Beta&#x27; [1], then officially unnamed, but occasionally referred to as &#x27;Facebook Arcade&#x27; [2].<p>At the time TechCruch wrote about this in August [3], it was less clear what their gaming portal ambitions were, and I lamented why they&#x27;d push this product with the Facebook brand so strongly instead of de-emphasizing it in favor of a different brand [4]. Since then, they had a partial change of heart -- the URL for this site is still through Facebook, but on the splash page, the only mention of Facebook is the [f] in the &#x27;Gameroom&#x27; logo.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adweek.com&#x2F;socialtimes&#x2F;facebook-games-arcade-beta&#x2F;639432" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adweek.com&#x2F;socialtimes&#x2F;facebook-games-arcade-beta...</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;arcade" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;arcade</a> [3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;08&#x2F;18&#x2F;facebook-desktop-game-platform&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;08&#x2F;18&#x2F;facebook-desktop-game-plat...</a> [4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12313908#12314672" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12313908#12314672</a>

This looks like a glorified browser for games that are already playable on browser. It doesn&#x27;t seem to be optimized for gaming at all (it even feels laggier). Is the purpose of it just to increase discoverability of Facebook games?<p>This is disappointing. When I read Facebook bought Gameroom.com a couple weeks ago, I expected something related to their VR platform. Not this.

&gt; From shooters to strategy, builders to bingo, find your game in Gameroom, designed for PC gaming.<p>I just can&#x27;t see this competing with Steam and Origin. It took years for Origin to get as much acceptance as it has in the PC market, and it started with AAA games people wanted - not &quot;Oz: Broken Kingdom&quot; and &quot;Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory Slots&quot;. Origin <i>still</i> gets crap because it isn&#x27;t Steam.

Is this the PC equivalent of Messenger, designed to give Facebook total access to your system?

I&#x27;m really getting tired of Facebook et. al trying to insert themselves into every facet of my existence.<p>I&#x27;ll keep using Steam and Gog. Steam is pretty bleh, but it does the job and I don&#x27;t have to put up with Facebook.

This feels and loads games like my moms Pogo games. Not a good start.

Origin, steam, battle net, uplay...<p>And now gameroom.<p>Is steam so profitable this makes sense? What possible motive does FB, one of the largest companies in the world, have to compete? The revenues should be paltry.

My problem is that I opened the website, read the description, and I still don&#x27;t know what this does. Is it a launcher for my PC games? Why the hell would I want another one?

Haha, finally I can have a desktop version of FarmVille.<p>Really tho, this is emblematic of the endemic problem with tech monoliths misunderstanding their audience. It somehow reminds me of a planning deck I once saw for supporting &quot;party planning&quot; mode where the actual use case was &quot;porn mode&quot; but the bizdev had to make it pc.

Didn&#x27;t Yahoo do this more than 10 years ago? I remember playing a lot of checkers as a lab monitor in college.

Facebook could do something so powerful and fun by seamlessly combining their social platform and games... But this is what they&#x27;ve come up with?

In case anyone else is curious, you can&#x27;t actually play any games unless you have the Facebook Apps Platform enabled, and you can&#x27;t play any games unless you share public profile info.<p>What I can&#x27;t figure out is who these game developers are and what they do with that info (beyond displaying my name in multiplayer games). Can it be used to build remarketing lists, etc?

* No feature list * No game list * Confusing as to what this has to do with &quot;rooms&quot; * Demands I download a web app!?!??!!?<p>Go home FB. You&#x27;re drunk.

PC only. is this 2004?

Windows only? Also no way to see what games exist without downloading?

I wonder if this has Unity webplayer &amp; Flash runtimes built into it so it will work even though browsers block those plugins now.<p>Edit: yes! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.facebook.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;post&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;01&#x2F;unity-editor-beta&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.facebook.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;post&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;01&#x2F;unity-e...</a>

&gt;<i>It can tie users deeper into the Facebook identity layer, making it harder for them to ditch the social network</i><p>It&#x27;s all about ecosystem lock-in for these tech giants. Their agenda-driven ways are not compatible with what gamers expect from a good platform.<p>It&#x27;s why so much hate is directed towards services such as Origin and even worse, Uplay - which needs to run in addition to the Steam client. Or any service requiring its own &quot;launcher&quot;. To its credit, Planet Coaster recently ditched its own launcher (Frontier Launchpad) and took the game to Steam. Frontier Launcher can now be uninstalled. Awesome. Planet Coaster is awesome btw.<p>Unless this &quot;Gameroom&quot; service allows sign-up via email address and avatar&#x2F;handle&#x2F;nickname identity, I&#x27;ll be giving it a miss. And even if does offer third party authentication, I&#x27;ll still likely give it a miss.

A board game room is a better place to play.

Seems like the comments here are slamming Facebook for this, but I think sometimes you have to take a step back and realize you might not be the target audience, and that products&#x2F;services typically launch before getting the proposition spot on.<p>The landing page is certainly light on text, looks like it&#x27;s got nothing to do with Oculus, and it&#x27;s Windows-only, but perhaps Facebook are approaching this as a start-up would? I am certain Facebook will test variants of that landing page, get installs from other parts of their platform, and if going beyond an MVP, add Oculus stuff and other platforms.<p>I&#x27;m not about to install it either, but I bet they get tens (maybe hundreds) of millions of installs before the end of 2016. From a start-up perspective, I find this type of launch more fascinating because I can watch them iterate.

Hacker news, where having a brand name means all products you released have to be fully featured, documented, well marketed, omni-platform and take full advantage of the &quot;obvious&quot; synergy with your existing products. Otherwise, it&#x27;s clearly total rubbish.<p>Maybe ah… this was built and released by a small team who may or may not go on to iterate on the implementation pending collection and evaluation of usage data. Perhaps you would like to comment on this as if it&#x27;s an early iteration? Maybe you could take the painful step of recognizing that the people who built it are people; individual human lives with limited time and resources and therefore attempted to strike a balance with respect to resources spent in an effort to release something, limited for sure but compelling.

Is Facebook GameRoom the new Yahoo Games?

Hey, what do you know. My new game Blight of the Immortals is already up and running in Gameroom. I didn&#x27;t have to do anything!<p>(Previously had the game inside one of those Facebook canvases. )

Why is this Windows-compatible only?

This is not going to end nicely. Forget about the fact that Steam is pretty much insurmountable for a second, but this a space Facebook doesn&#x27;t belong in.

This is obviously a strong play by Facebook taken from the WeChat playbook. Furthermore, it helps connect the dots with their Oculus purchase. Believe it or not, any company... even Facebook, can brand themselves as a gaming&#x2F;entertainment company over time. It was not too long ago that Facebook was the de-facto platform for games such as Farmville.

Looks like they changed the name from facebook arcade. The help in my language refers to it as arcade.

Great. A furthering of the attempted fragmentation of my gaming license management software.<p>For the same reason that I don&#x27;t buy things on UPlay and Origin, I won&#x27;t be buying things on Gameroom.

I think PC gamer hate Facebook, or barely find it relevant? True?

Your aunt and mother will soon be chatting over messanger while they compete in a candy crush tournament, all with a browser on chromebooks. They&#x27;re not here for you hardcore gamers. They will come for you later,once they have dominated... oh wait, Windows only? Haha haha, never mind.

No thanks.