Have you heard of Gameroom? The new Steam competitor?

I just found out about this new thing called Gameroom from Facebook by watching some random video on Youtube. Apparently it is a Steam competitor. So...[sigh].... I guess this is yet another platform that we shall have to support with our games. And probably requires screenshots in completely different sizes from the ones I've all ready made.

Can't really see it catching on. Instinctively it feels like a platform nobody will use like Blackberry games or Kindle games or Google Plus. As is usually the case with "me too" applications. But also, I can't risk not supporting this platform. Probably will be most popular for casual games.

Is Unity supporting this platform in any ways? Are there any guides for getting Unity games on this platform?

Why have I never heard of it before? What do you think of it?

On a slightly connected note, I notice that as well as indie games on Steam people are also making indie movies. I think this is a very exciting idea that people could self publish indie movies on Steam. Because its very hard for indie filmmakers to get on other channels like Netflix. Maybe people could make animations using the sequencers coming up in Unity 5 and put indie animated movies on Steam. (But would you be required to add a splash screen to your movie I wonder?)

 

Yes, there's is early Unity build available to publish there
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/games/gameroom

https://blogs.unity3d.com/kr/2016/1...ild-target-now-available-as-a-developer-beta/

 

Because you're like me and rely on the forums for actual news.

 

OMG. Thankyou so much.

Oh, just realised it's Unity 5 so, it would have that Splash Screen. [cough] Maybe time to upgrade to Unity Plus.

Is this the only way? Wouldn't there be another way, such as when you have a game not made in Unity? I'll research.

Now the gamble is, will it be worth the time and effort to port? Hmm... and is it really just not cool to support Facebook gaming? Steam is the cool kid on the block after all.

 

Are you developing your games for mobile or WebGL platforms? Or PC? It feels like the former is what this new platform truly competes with. Just look at the best practices section of the main site and how it recommends your game be at most 50MB compressed. That's roughly the size you would expect for games intended for those platforms.

I'm going to bet that the chances of success are going to ultimately be similar to what they are now for them too.

 

I'm hoping its more for PC games because I can't see mobile games working particularly well for this. Especially as most PCs don't have things like touch screens and sensors etc. It would be like using an Android emulator which is no fun at all. And that wouldn't be much of a Steam competitor. 50MB compressed seems very small. This is very strange. OK I'm less excited now. Now it feels like Chrome Apps. Blugh.

 

What rock are you under? Unity has been pushing this through the forums for a while. It even featured heavily in the Unite keynotes.

I personally haven't looked into it, because I don't like developing for FaceBook. They have a history of poor documentation, poor revenue sharing deals, closing down important services and other general stuff to make developers uncomfortable.

Don't let my bias put you off. Go for it if you are interested. But I will be sticking to Steam, brick and mortar, or direct orders.

 

You see, I'm away from the forums for a few weeks and miss all the important stuff! Too much watching Conan O'Brien clips on Youtube.

 

This being a steam competitor seems like nonsense considering this is highly unlikely to be targeting the same audience.

 

Hmm.. I guess it was just a click-bate YouTube video which I fell for.

 

Here is the main Unity thread on this topic:
https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/p...w-facebook-games-platform-for-windows.426507/

 

If i can use it to rake in dough then i'll consider it.

 

Has Facebook called this a Steam competitor, or is that just what the journalists are saying? Everything I've seen points to Facebook looking to just get more of the casual audience it already has, not to "compete" with Steam.

 

I heard "It is not possible to uninstall games from Gameroom" somewhere on this forum. Meaning it is not much of a competitor yet.

 

Like they removed "simple application hosting" for webgl games, just few days ago.

Anyway, there is little to no documentation about these very important business topics.

• Market curation
• Monetization scheme
• Marketing facilities

Yet it does not look like a steam competitor to me. If I see this platform viable from business perspective I will consider taking risk.

 

just had to log in here to say "less than 50meg" .. HA HA! WHAT a crock of facebook typical stupid S***

 

its not a steam competitor at all.

Facebook realised that some people would like to play the same games they love on mobiles on their desktop.
its like playing android games on a PC emulator.

So you no longer need to download emulators.

Good idea but "Don't let my bias put you off" yes I will let it put me off

 

Lol. Reason I stated that is because I haven't built games for Facebook for a couple of years. It used to be horrible, but they might have changed. Or not.

 

They eventually figured it out.

https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/no-way-to-uninstall-games-from-the-facebook-gameroom-app.439524/

 

Well is Facebook still really a thing? Last time I checked it was going the way of myspace..

 

Facebook has a HUGE userbase from age 35+ iirc

 

Facebook is a huge thing that's not going away. As a social media service it's pretty awesome. Pretty much evey human I know is on it multiple times a day. But as a game service it's traditionally been pretty poor.

 

What's funny is games were a big part of what drove Facebook to success over MySpace. Farmville and the like were a huge draw that helped it get critical mass.

 

That may be true. I'm not sure it was the dominant factor though.

There were also tech factors. FaceBook was the only network that managed to scale up its tech as it hit critical mass.

FaceBook actually had less functionality (and still has less functionality) then many of the other proto-social networks. However many other networks simply slowed to a crawl or crashed once the user base got high.

 

Eh?! Now facebook has way more features than any other platform around by far.
How about : App login, messaging, location checkout, live streaming, video and photo sharind, extensive api support, gaming, micro transactions, ads network with super fine grained targeting and more. Some less successful than other but still there.

 

Now it does. It wasn't always that way.

I can still do less with it then I could with Bebo, back in the day. Problem was, Bebo wasn't able to scale up with increasing numbers, and ultimately died because of it. On an old dial up connection Facebook could load a page in seconds, where as Bebo was still thinking about loading after a couple of minutes. There were several other networks (at least where I was growing up in NZ) most of them did more then Facebook. But none of them did it as well as Facebook. And all of them suffered heavily from scaling with numbers.

Facebook is still missing a bunch of features that many of those proto social networks had. Facebook just has a news feed. some of the early competitors let me have half a dozen walls, all customized for different stuff. Facebook has a single layout, others let me customize what was where with a bunch of widgets on my page. Heck, Facebook doesn't even support themes.

 

That's probably the number one reason facebook is still around. Most people don't want to see a flashing page with glitters and thousand of animated gifs, even if they could load quickly. It's the usual saying "don't give them what you want but give them what they need".

 

Exactly. It ended up being a classic case of less is more.

 

I haven't looked at Gameroom really yet, but sense it's a steam competitor or whatever, does it allow you to sell games like steam? Or is it for free games like on facebook already?

 

The 50mb compressed limit is a joke.

I guess very casual small games only then.

 

That's not a steam competitor.

I guess if all the mobile port garbage ends up here instead of polluting steam more, that's a good thing

 

I didn't go to any of their presentations or talk to the reps at Unite, although it did later occur to me that my Diplomacy-clone would be a good fit if I can meet that 50MB limit, because FB then becomes an easy-to-manage community (just create a FB Group) which was something I wasn't looking forward to building, but is almost a necessity for this type of game.

So with that in mind, I dug around their developer pages for quite awhile, but didn't see anything about sales except in terms of in-app purchases. In my case, if I were to go this route, a trial period is probably how I'd handle sales.

The 50MB limit strikes me as odd given that it's Windows-desktop-only right now, and they already have a completely separate delivery system for mobile.

 

It is, among the youngsters.... they are a generation more into snapchat and instagram it seems. Facebook has become the social media network of the older generation. Guess they either start to succeed at diversifying their rooster (maybe happens with VR, but I doubt it given some of the crappy Occulus business decisions), they make Facebook more attractive to the young generation, or they will fade away ins obscurity.

Personally, I think they should stop boasting about their 500000000 billion users that have signed up (of which at least 50% since has gone inactive), stop trying to shove ads into the face of their remaining users like mad and experimenting on them in unethical ways, and just see if they can diversify into new directions the way google did.
When hear google, you think about search engines, mobile phones, geo informatics shenigans, robots/drones, self driving cars.
When you hear facebook, you think about social media.... maybe about how Occulus sounded all cool and gamer oriented before facebook bought it. Thats it. IMO, that has to change.


Anyway. 50MB limitation? Yeah right, sounds like a great place for SNES ROMS, and a Retro emulator community to grow. PS1 Era games and the arcade hits ported for the NEO GEO will already be too much.

Good luck with that.


I would stick to Steam for now, until that new marketplace has proven itself (and has the capacity to at least host PS1 era games... I know most of those 700MB were most probably filled with pointless and horribly compressed cutscenes, still.... this is 2016, not 1996 )

 

@MV10 : Yeah umm 50 meg limit, really? There goes one texture in my game haha. How's that supposed to be a steam competitor? 50 megs, really... I could understand if it didn't touch PC's at all and was strictly mobile, but considering it's for PC's, they are missing out on a big market for games like you know, GTA, etc.

I'm sure people would much rather go through Facebook than Steam if they've never heard of steam. (Speaking for casual gamers). Of course any hard core gamer know's what Steam is haha.

But just some normal every day average joe might never heard of Steam.

 

My turn-based stuff tends to use just a few large textures and lots of small ones. The one I'm working on now debug-compiles to just 15MB at the moment. But obviously it's an edge case.

Oh yeah, I *did* see places in the dev docs that talked about much larger images. I want to say they mentioned 200MB somewhere. So maybe that 50MB thing is a mistake. I got the impression a lot of the new dev docs were copied over from their existing mobile stuff.

 

Even 200mb is pretty tight for a huge amount of PC games. I'm pretty sure my current project has that much in audio alone.

 

Yeah like for-real. There should be like no limit. Could you imagine what GTA and Battlefield would look like at 200 megs.
It would only be a Logo.

Just saying, they aren't going to be much of a steam competitor if they sanction limits to the size.
Sizes only make sense for mobile games, because obviously they can only hold but so much space.

But PC games, size shouldn't not be a set limit in any way shape or form.
Now I could see if the game was like 500 gigs, that's a bit overkill at this period in time.

 

It's not supposed to be a Steam competitor and AFAIK that has not been said anywhere officially, or even hinted. It's supposed to be a user friendly click and play platform for mostly casual players (similar to mobile). The audience does not like to wait and they just want to find something nice looking and play it for 15-30 mins instead of waiting the same time downloading or setting up.

 

500MB mentioned in the "Build" section...

 

The wording there is strange. It looks like they may charge extra for larger game sizes?

 

Yeah I wondered about that too. Then I wondered if they were talking about some kind of cloud data storage (database, and/or maybe server-side execution) but I couldn't find anything along those lines.

Looked around a little more for information about charging a purchase price up front, too, and didn't find anything more on that, either.