Facebook Gameroom platform Deprecation?

Hi there,

Just saw the deprecation message. Is Facebook Going to abandon it or Unity is and whats the reason behind it?

Thanks

 

Avoid Gameroom. Waste of time. They allow you to go to all the trouble of porting a game, approve it, then dont allow it to be searchable even after you spent money on ads and porting the game. Then give you no reason/feedback on the decision, close the thread and thats it. Avoid like the plague!!

 

Facebook is a difficult platform to trust as a developer. It's always changing and it's hard to keep up with. I only integrate the minimum amount to get useful marketing from them now. Everything else tends to be tricky and breaks a lot.

 

3D WebGL game do not work in Facebook Gameroom because it do not support completely locking cursor. So you can't rotate at 360 degrees.
You can host it and it work but for an FPS game as exemple , it's dead.

 

They should just be more open and honest about the platform, if its dead, kill it off. Do not have people spending time and resources to port a game, approve it and then not link it and give you no feedback as to why. Not a lot to ask for.

 

Just released on Facebook Gameroom yesterday. We did it as a soft beta launch to test player interest and get analytics for our new game. They have these great Unite reveal videos from 2-3 years ago then nothing. Googling for help brings up scant info or redirects to useless fb pages with basic info. They barely reference Gameroom on their site in the developer section - mostly instant games etc. And there's barely any Unity forum posts. search "gameroom" and see for yourself. So yeah, very few Unity devs are putting stuff on Gameroom.

However, approval for us was super fast - like within 4 hours - probably because no one is submitting their games anymore - i don't know. We turned the game on and go live - I log in with my public fb account and can't find it in the Gameroom client. What's weird is the first time we got approved (had to fix a few things) it showed up under "Action", now nothing. Searching with exact name in Gameroom client brings up nothing.

What's really laughable is all the old articles I come across about how Facebook Gameroom "may be a Steam killer" - lolololol - maybe if the Russians take it over! I can't believe how some platforms treat their dev community. What a waste of my valuable time!

Neverthesless, for us, all the push to a final stable beta was a good process to work out some issues and bring up some user and feature questions that need addressing in future releases - ON OTHER PLATFORMS! So there's that.

 

A new or unestablished platform is never worth the risk for a developer unless that platform pays for the dev cost of a project plus some profit margin. You are risking your dev time, developing value for their platform with no guarantee they will deliver their end of the deal.

 

Agreed for the most part, but Facebook is not new to casual games. They're a Billion $ company with resources. We've had other games on their platform for years (before Gameroom) that have done reasonably well. You'd think they'd be able to extend this via Gameroom with ease and promote the hell out of it.

Having had past experience with them, the assumption was that Gameroom would be another extension of their already established and relatively successful casual game platform. Yet with Gameroom you have the ability to download "better or bigger" desktop games similar to how Steam works. But it looks like they're just not interested in supporting or promoting it and haven't been for a couple years. They just threw it out there like hey we're Facebook, we're cool, we have a shiny new extension platform for our games, you know we have the resources to make this cool...then...Crickets. It's been out for a couple years. More than enough time to improve it. The fact that Unity is stopping support says it all though.

Just suprised by Facebook's attitude with all the money and talent.

So we have big updates coming in about six months that will really fill the game out. I'll just use Gameroom as our test bed with the few players who use it so if anything blows up while implementing new features we won't be globally embarassed. Then we'll put in on all the other "real" platforms. That is if they don't turn Gameroom off in a few weeks.

 

P.S. Despite all this...still love you guys at Unity. Been using it since v2.6. Your support has been great over the years. And recently had experienced it on Xbox forums and now Playstation - keep up the great work guys.

 

Yeah, but when you've been around games and tech as long as I have you'll know that even the big guns fail when launching new products all the time. All Nvidia consoles, xBox live arcade (they killed it off by imposing an arbitrary limit on releases per year without telling devs until over a year or so later and back then there weren't a lot of alternative platforms), Google Plus, all VR platforms, I suspect Stadia and Apple Arcade will also have rocky starts as well. Facebook in my opinion has been one of the more volatile platforms ever, their SDK and publishing rules change every few months it seems and they'll kick you off in 7 days if you suddenly don't adhere to the rules, so this is no surprise to me at all.

If they pay you, go for it. Otherwise, your game should probably survive fine on iOS, Android and Steam, if it doesn't you're probably not making the right game.


Edit: I agree, of all the companies I've had to partner with over the years I've been developing, Unity is the only one that continuously makes my life easier and has never made a shock change to the way they do business. Thanks Unity. Keep it up.

 

That only really provides assurance that they wont completely vanish or sell out to someone large overnight.

Its no guarantee that they will retain interest in one of their own products/services/platforms, especially as they have the luxury of giving up on such things without losing their entire business. Just look at how ruthlessly Google drop things if they lose interest in them.

 

Thank you, im happy i wont be wasting my time on Gameroom.

 

I have a game I have been working on for over a year...so is gameroom dead or what? I will just fill the switch to a different platform

 

You can find the answer here:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/facebook-gameroom-platform-deprecation.637213/#post-4495726

 

Well, I thought it was a tad... "fishy" when everyone that asked a Unity question in their Developer forums was ignored, but if you asked a php/java/etc question then Facebook was right on it...
For the most part, Facebook is *still* just a bunch of php/java devs thinking that they are the shiznit.
It's not that there's not interest in the platform, it's that if you run into an error or issue, you're S.O.L. in getting an answer in a timely fashion. So far, Facebook publishing has been the worst experience ever for me and my company. (It's really been horrible, and that's downplaying it a LOT!)

 

Can i launch a game developed in unity on facebook gameroom direct . I dont want to launch it on instant games , neither do i want to use my apple developer id . can i do this ?

 

This answer was way too hard to find. It took like an hour of searching. Largely because Facebook still references this build target as though it exists, so most of the searching was about how to get it rather than it no longer being available.

Maybe that's on them but I doubt I am the only person who dithered away a bunch of time finding a simple "we don't support it and you don't need it".

Could we get a graveyard page in the documentation or something?

 

And now Gameroom and fb web games are closing: https://www.facebook.com/fbgaminghome/blog/important-changes-to-gameroom-and-web-games-on-facebook