Anyone who has a Facebook account has probably once been inundated by an avalanche of game invitations. From Farmville to Battlestations, gaming apps have been a big money vendor for the social media giant, prompting them to grow the field. For instance, the company is working to incorporate Facebook logins for Blizzard’s PC games such as Hearthstone and Overwatch. So it should come as no surprise that Facebook has also teamed up with Unity in a bid to support game developers.
Unity Technologies and Facebook are working together to expand Facebook’s set of game developer tools and services and give Unity developers new ways to reach and engage the millions of gamers on Facebook. Unity Technologies, for those of you that don’t know, is the largest global development platform for creating 2D, 3D, VR and AR games. It’s also the developer of Unity, the game engine that nearly every single gaming app on the app store is built upon. As an extension of the existing relationship, Unity will also integrate support for the Facebook platform, including an all-new PC gaming platform that is currently in development.
The platform will allow games based on the Unity engine to be quickly delivered by developers to the more than 650 million people who enjoy playing games on the social media platform every month. It’s quite the astronomical figure and with Facebook pursuing gaming related partnerships quite avidly in the past couple of months, I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a Steam-like gaming platform in the coming years. However, if the platform is only restricted to Unity games, it may restrict interest in the platform.
Currently, a closed alpha build is being offered to a select few developers and studios, with no timeline of wide scale availability. Furthermore, the integration only works for games based on Unity version 5.4 and above.
Source: Developers Blog
