HomeWinBuzzer NewsFacebook Officially Announces Gameroom, Its Counterpart to Steam

Facebook Officially Announces Gameroom, Its Counterpart to Steam

The Windows-native client is available as a free download for players worldwide. Windows 7 and above systems are supported.

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The announcement came through Unity's game development platform conference where it's been in development for several months. Users can experience web games, as well as native games built solely for the platform. There are several benefits in building native games for Gameroom:

  • Focus is on the gameplay for players through exclusive and immersive gaming experience
  • Native development in Facebook Gameroom takes less time. It's much easier compared to HTML5, providing better solutions around threading, debugging, networking and memory management.
  • Better performance regarding app launch timings and memory consumption in native games.

Facebook support will ship as part of Unity 5.6 beginning in early 2017. This allows developers to export their games directly to Gameroom desktop app for Windows and to Facebook using Unity's WebGL support.

Entering the PC gaming market

After venturing into Android and iOS gaming territory, Facebook is stepping into PC gaming world with its gaming platform. There is much work to be done since because of the fierce competition in and Xbox gaming platforms.

Facebook Gameroom
Image credit: Facebook

Many see 's Steam platform with its 125 active million users as the biggest competition. The fan favorite among more serious gamers, Steam also has millions of active players.

However, the numbers game is exactly where Facebook is up to the challenge. As of the second quarter of 2016, Facebook had 1.71 billion monthly active users. Along with Facebook's social charm, this presents a huge potential for the platform's growth.

Facebook is looking to cater to casual gamers with its new platform, bringing back the experience of casual web gaming. The social network will also appeal to developers with its enormous reach, hence making it worth their while to invest their talents.

With Gameroom, Facebook is hoping to establish an easier way for developers to bring high-quality games to the PC. Facebook relies on taking full advantage of the CPU and GPU native power through its Unity support.

You can download Facebook Gameroom here.

Sead Fadilpasic
Sead Fadilpasichttp://journalancer.com/
Sead is a former Al Jazeera journalist who shares his passion for technology on various tech media outlets. Formerly a heavy gamer (semi-professional Warcraft 3 gosu), he now enjoys reviewing software and churning out words about the latest tech-news. He holds a college degree in Journalism and likes to annoy his neighbors by playing one of his three electric and two acoustic guitars.

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