Facebook PC Gaming have big plans on the horizon for their gaming department. The social media giant has partnered with the game engine, UNITY and plan to give Steam a run for their money, and, more importantly, a cut of the PC Gamer pie.
Facebook had Farmville back in their heyday and people took it up en-masse, for a very short time. Smartphones appeared on the general radar of the populus and the casual gamer headed there, leaving Facebook behind.
The new deal will allow publishers of both Android and iOS apps to offer them through a dedicated gaming portal, because Playstore and appstore don’t already offer this? The new build of UNITY will allow application dev’s to easily export their existing games to the Facebook format.
This sounds great on paper. The only problem with this that I can see (as a PC gamer) is that the games that UNITY have to offer presently seem pretty dire. If you are after blockbuster titles on Facebook then you are going to be disappointed.
The one saving grace that I can see for this new development is that Facebook has Occulus Rift and Unity offers a seamless interface for VR when compared to the clunkiness of Facebook.
Although Steam has its own SteamVR, you can quite easily get the Rift working on Steam; RoadToVR have put up a good guide on how to do this. When you realise how simple this is to do, then the real question arises on why you would want to move from Steam to a Facebook pc gaming platform?