Facebook is building its own Steam-style desktop gaming platform with Unity
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Facebook would be smart to have gaming and social as two separate things with optional integration with Facebook. They'll screw it up because they'll make the optional part super annoying. Because when have they not?
I turned off my Facebook years ago. That works fine for me, but I'm frustrated any time someone uses Facebook to post something I'd like to read (like yann lecun or john carmack) because it's a step backwards. It'd be like Doom being released as an AOL exclusive.
Anyway, my money's on steam and ue4 dominating for years to come, not a new dist platform and not unity.
Also, does Unity still not give you the source code? I assume they'll change this soon enough; you get the source code with ue4.
I kind of see it like blender vs maya or something. Lots of people are using blender, and it's very powerful. But industry is using Maya (because it's more powerful), and that won't change for a bit I think (good for autodesk).
I regret every non-art unity asset store purchase I made. Need behavior trees pick one of 10 crappy maintained assets etc etc. Constantly felt like I needed to purchase something to fill some gap in unity or spend tons of time developing my own solution.
I don't feel that way at all in UE4.
I believe that the issue isn't that they don't want to share, but that the code is a pile of patchwork that would need to be re-engineered before presenting it to anyone outside the company.
Unity has better marketing. The captured larger audience and thus got more content on their asset market and it has became default engine for beginners (C# seems much easier to learn than C++).
Unity is like Visual Basic of gamedev.
Large swathes of even professional programmers have now come into the industry never having had to really deal with manual memory management. (And I happen to think that's fine.)
Given that, and the rising popularity of indie/amateur games, I fail to see how one couldn't count C/C++ as a negative as far as market penetration is concerned.
Since I started from Assembler, it's hard for me to estimate how hard is C++ to some beginner. Managing memory came as a natural extension of understanding how the computer works.
> I'd attribute the ability to work with it from a managed language with a large part of its success relative to UE4.
You are probably right, but I simply cannot feel it. Thus "seems".
> Given that, and the rising popularity of indie/amateur games
I believe indie games reached their peak in 2011/2012 and got a huge drop in quality/quantity ratio since.
Yes, there is a lot of of C++ under the hood in Unity, but I also remember the days when writing game engines in C and Pascal dialects actually the majority of the code looked something like:
procedure MyProc; assembler;
asm
(* assembly *)
end;
We need more success stories like Unity to keep driving the industry forward.
The next fight was to move from C and C++ to Java and C++. This still hasn't happened in console gaming because the overhead needed for gc is not palatable to aaa developers that have to milk every byte of ram in the machine.
Regarding GC and consoles, how do the UE 4 developers approach it, just disable the GC related features then?
The UE4 GC is purpose built, simple (mark and sweep), and limited to only certain objects/allocations. The only time I've seen significant GC times/hitches was related to a bug that resulted in thousands of small allocations every second. I would much prefer if Epic dropped the GC - losing tight control over object lifetimes is as bad or worse than any potential performance overhead issues in my experience - but failing that I don't think its inclusion is a serious concern for shipping on consoles.
But does it still provide a great experience for gamers and creators? I'd wager so say they can do a lot better, but they're letting their success stagnate them. Buggy mobile apps, questionable revenue share on Workshop items, no strong answer to the discovery of good games ever since Greenlight came out, IMHO Valve isn't doing enough with their platform on their own. I'd welcome competition to get them to perk up their step a bit.
I'd even go so far as to say Valve not caring is a good thing. They don't try to interfere too much and when they do and it blows up they walk it back.
Ridiculous statement.
Waiting weeks for a support request is not a good thing.
Waiting weeks then getting response in russian is not a good thing.
The app being a generally slow clunky experience is not a good thing.
Piss poor preview games is not a good thing.
CS Go gambling is not a good thing.
DotA2 is not a good thing. :p
A lot of things were even worse before Origin arrived and Valve started at least a half-assed attempt to make things better.
Obviously.
I guess the mobile app is kind of crappy. I've never really cared as I don't see any reason to use it.
I appreciate Valve pushing for better security, but with the authenticator app the only option this really sucks if you don't have a smartphone, or do have a smartphone, just not with Android, IOS, or Windows Phone on it.
Now I understand this for the interim (people were losing their digital items due to poor security), but it is damn near impossible to contact Steam with suggestions or comments (on the Steam forums your voice is drowned in a sea of despair, and I can't seem to get a hold of anyone with a technical background at Steam's help-desk). Perhaps if someone at Valve is reading HN: please consider using Fido U2F as an alternative to a smartphone app!
Already have steam, gog galaxy, origin, and uplay for various things. I use only the former 2 as much as I can.
If I recall, it was optional for CounterStrike1.4, but then required for CS1.6.
The PC bunch were crying that they'd never use this DRM'd buggy POS.
That must have been 16+ years ago. Steam has come a long way since then, and has been credited [0] with helping reduce PC game piracy over the years. Likely because steam just works for the most part, and is as easy if not easier than the alternative.
I just don't see how Facebook can really disrupt this given Steams head start and positive mind share (not to mention the libraries of games that users have likely accrued over the years)
0: http://www.digital-digest.com/news-62904-PC-Gaming-Piracy-On...
Their sales definitely had something to do with this as well. Before these kinds of sales, PC games were fixed at a certain price point and would take a long time to see a price drop. Now, I'll see fairly new games that may be marked down anywhere from 10% to 25% and, at least for me, I feel much more inclined to purchase it if I like it.
Granted I have a backlog of games to get through, but still it made purchasing games much more approachable as I know I won't be breaking my wallet over one game.
1.6 was the only version on Steam, 1.5 used the WonID servers, which they shut down a few years later.
The largest issue with Steam when it was released was the fact that the client was slow as molasses, and plenty of others had resource issues since you had to also run the client in the background along with whichever game you were playing.
There are plenty of people who play games who've never heard of Steam, and whose friends aren't on Steam, but who are on Facebook.
A lot of those people might be ripe to get sucked into the hobby if Facebook manages to advertise the right game in their feed.
Hidden object games, educational games for children, iOS and Android ports.
In the case of the former two - with no real marketing, and with a great deal of competition, these still fly off the digital shelves, and are not expensive to produce. There are people who want these games, and Steam honestly is not doing the best job of getting in touch with these people. Integration with the rest of the Facebook ecosystem would really really help push these games towards the people who want to buy them.
For the last option, people often buy these games when they felt good about playing the iOS/Android game and want to continue the experience (or in rare cases, play a more full-featured version - usually the PC port is incomplete, but sometimes it does contain unique bonuses). I imagine Facebook would have a killer app if it could sync your iOS/Android saved games (or even just achievements) to the PC version of the save game.
TL:DR; I think there's a huge opportunity for a major casual gaming platform, and I think Facebook's pretty well placed to be that platform.
Worth pointing out that both were employed by Facebook (and AFAICT both are still there). I would genuinely be surprised if they used google+ or some other platform for posts
I've only had great experiences with GOG as a platform.
..and I love Steam, too, and both are committed to Linux as a platform for the future. (When is Portal 3 coming?!)
They each have carved out such a great niche and they're each both gamer and developer friendly.. I'm not so sure that FB has demonstrated being either of those things.
I develop on the mac and pc in UE4. On the mac ue4 performance is bad and you need the top of the line mac to deal with it. Personally I just write c++ on the mac and keep the editor closed most of the time until i need to test the code real quick in a very basic level. Then when im on my pc i do the heavy stuff.
But I already gave up on Spotify since the web player is buggy and full of memory leaks. But I'm sure their apps are fine.
https://www.spotify.com/us/signup/
If you already have an account, I'm not sure there's a way to de-associate it, but you could probably delete the old account and create a new one.
I'd love to take the same bet you do, but if you have a killer product that requires the platform, people will use it. Half Life 2 and Counter Strike 1.6 were the killer products for Steam. Mass Effect 3 and The Old Republic are mostly the only reasons anyone I know installed Origin at first (and I'm sure other games now).
If Facebook finds that app, it won't matter how terrible their platform is.
It will be enjoyably ironic when Facebook starts Google-Plussing it's own projects to death!
I don't exactly disagree. Rather, I think the underlying problem is orthogonal to the one you're paying attention to. Facebook's problem is that they let people think of Facebook games as being somehow separate from mobile. The far-seeing move would've been to make Facebook across the desktop, mobile, et al., as views into a single ecosystem.
Anyway, my money's on steam and ue4 dominating for years to come, not a new dist platform and not unity.
I like the sound of this, but what are your reasons for this?
Especially disappointing coming from Carmack who used to be a champion of openness. How has he changed...
http://www.geek.com/games/john-carmack-finally-prefers-direc...
That said they really need to catch up with the Rift - maybe their focus on the lower end of the market with Gear VR will save them, but outside of this the Rift is pretty disappointing.
Steam game support for games that run on both the Rift and Vive make it stupid to buy games on the Oculus store, but worse than that once you've played with the touch controls and room scale that the Vive offers it's clear the Rift just does not compare.
The Vive is heavier, it's hardware is not as aesthetically pleasing and it's clunkier (more wires, bigger pain to set up). Other than that though it's categorically better - if Oculus doesn't ship some touch controllers and room scale sensors soon I think they'll lose the high end market (unless they're able to power through on brand alone). The Vive also has an interesting front facing camera and doesn't let light in through the nose.
I've been seeing people on Craigslist selling their Rift and keeping their Vive - not a good sign for Oculus.
My Rift is unplugged and in the closet.
Facebook is a terrible company.
I'm not saying they don't have the money or technical talent, but clearly the politics of Facebook are morally onerous to gamers. Everything about the Rift should have been a slam dunk. It had the mindshare, pr, capital, early adopter advantage, etc. Hell they even have John Carmack.
Now its the red headed stepchild of the VR wars. Oculus went from a gamer friendly company to what seems to be something run by a bunch of milquetoast MBA's with zero interest or experience in gaming. Cut-throat deals like exclusives, contradictory and anti-consumer policies, confusing PR (why is Luckey yelling at people on reddit?), inability to catch up (no motion controls yet?), etc have hurt the brand and the Vive seems like the go-to for VR right now. In a couple months the PSVR will be out, with motion controls. Where exactly does that leave Oculus? As the has-been of the industry?
I can't see Facebook winning over the PC gamer crowd. Casuals have mobile, they're not installing this thing. Beating Steam means beating Steams street cred which its been carefully building for over a decade. I just don't think companies like Facebook have the culture to win here. The types of people who can work a monopoly well in the social media space are pretty much the worst kinds of people you want in the gaming industry, and Oculus's failures are proof of that.
Oculus isn't a gaming company and Facebook didn't buy it for it to be one. Facebook sees VR as the next big social platform.
> Oculus's failures are proof of that
The Rift has outsold the Vive 10 to 1. And the Gear has sold over a million units.
Cite? That'd require a million Rift CV1s sold, which seems excessive.
Completely false. Vive has outsold CV1 2:1 so far. Best approximate numbers right now are 50,000 Rifts to 100,000 Vives.
Is anyone really interested in social VR? Converge crashed and burned, and competitors like vTime are more or less just Second Life without the building.
FB thinks having immediate access to the social graph will change that. I'm not convinced - because it's hard to make Avatars that don't look comically uncool, and to be compelling, the interaction needs to offer a lot more than Facetime/Skype++ in some fake locations.
Facebook could have been the built-in contact list that updated itself (a huge feature for even a basic phone), and combined with FB messenger and photos, could have done 90% of what many of it's users (e.g. my wife) would want.
They completely failed then walked it all back.
Remember when Zuck declared that Android was their main OS [1]? How's that working out?
[1] http://gizmodo.com/5937344/facebook-for-android-is-so-crappy...
Facebook is a platform for advertisers, but users are the ones who buy games.
Carmack worked on the Rift while an employee of ZeniMax. A ZeniMax, Facebook, Rift share split then blew up, leaving ZeniMax with nothing, despite the fact that Carmack and ZeniMax were instrumental in the development of the Rift. Carmack then left ZeniMax for Facebook.
Steam was that way for a very long time, and the bodies of it's various issues are what it's currently built upon. Companies should just get on the Steam train, take advantage of that platform and stop trying to invent a new Steam.
One day Valve will stumble, but I don't think that the spoils will go to one of those who made fools of themselves while Valve didn't.
Ambition is a hindrance to trust, that's why from the current crop, the only plausible candidate for a Steam successor is GoG. They give a believable impression of keeping up their business as long as they at least keep a certain niche of the market, while everything else looks like projects of the "displace Steam within x years or be shelved" kind.
Steam has been a godsend to indie developers. It can be a great partner for AAA ones as well.
Valve opened up access and the research to their lighthouse tech, but it requires sensors on the device for orientation.
I don't think the existing Rifts have these sensors so room scale VR may be something they're just not able to do. This is a pretty big disadvantage.
Except that there are barely any VR games worth playing. When Oculus ships Touch later this year it will ship with 30+ games that support it. People have been complaining about Oculus exclusives, but without incentives it makes no financial sense for developers to invest in AAA VR games when the install base is so small.
There's a lot of bad stuff out there, since Unity has a low entry point. But Unity is not inherently bad; it's just that some developers lack the chops to do it well.
Inside was a Unity game, and it was a dream to play from a technical perspective.
In other words, sometimes worse is truly better.
I keep hearing that double precision floats for coordinates are unrealistic because of the optimisations that are available only for 32 bit floats, but I am willing to make serious sacrifices to free myself from the Spheres of Influence and the Orbital Railroad of Destiny; the real solar system mod forces a full scale environment, and even though the visual geometry is off by roughly a metre from the physical geometry, I still consider it to be an improvement.
This post by the Outerra dev on planetary scale precision issues and on how to circumvent some issues by implementing custom log scale depth buffers offers a good introduction.
http://outerra.blogspot.de/2012/11/maximizing-depth-buffer-r...
How are 32 bit addresses inadequate? Just have a multi-level addressing system and you're done. You're going to have a Level of Detail system anyway, right? This seems like a non-issue.
It's not like you need to do math on grains of sand spread across multiple galaxies.
This is demonstrably not true. Just look at the limitations of the standard shader to see where Unity falls apart. Or hell input handling or any number of features for which UE4 has a better solution (or at least a path towards a better solution since you have the source code).
On paper, GoG isn't doing things that differently than EA and Ubisoft (just the no-DRM bit, which is admittedly a pretty great selling point), but I think EA and Ubisoft's brands are just so toxic that people are loathe to use them for anything they aren't forced to use them for. I think Facebook runs into much the same problem nowadays. Their brand is just increasingly toxic outside their core business, and the network effect is strong enough that people don't really have much of a choice there.
Blizzard is also a player, but like EA and Ubi they only sell their own products through it.
Aside: EA has effectively wiped most knowledge of its existence from the Internet, but I remember when EA launched its first Origin platform back around the 2006 era, and then discontinued it a couple years later. I lost all my Battlefield 2 expansions, and I've been incredibly gunshy about them ever since.
I'm not (entirely) opposed to social integration of my gaming. But if a compelling gaming portal introduces social network integration, I'm more amenable to it than going the other direction, when a social network makes me download another desktop app.
It's also somewhat contrary to Facebook's established practice of having distinct brands (albeit as a result of acquisitions); a brand that appeals to a different demographic. Instagram appeals to a different kind of person than Facebook; WhatsApp appeals to a different kind of person than Messenger, and the like.
That said, I assume it will be successful and I'm a fan of the idea. It'll help bridge that gap from a casual browser-flash gamer to start installing clients and move onto more serious entertainment.
I'm confident this WILL remain a tool for strictly casual gamers, though. Discerning/younger audiences only use FB for event invites at this point.
Steam rules the space because it has fought for credibility in the gamer community. Facebook on the other hand caused so much hate/drama when they bought Oculus.
Further segmenting your software between services, is exactly what people use Steam to AVOID. The fact that everything is in one place, no lost keys, no lost disc, is its selling point. It's bad enough I have to also use Origin to play some key games. So I'm certainly not going to further dilute my libraries.
Between Carmack and Facebook's ability to buy any developer who is on the market I think they can put up a solid contender at launch. Probably won't be enough though; I see this more as a Tidal or Apple Music kind of move--existing major player enters the market with desirable exclusives or platform integration but fails to break out of the middle of the pack.
and a new marketplace with either better rates or simply less competition than Steam
with the user base of Facebook
I agree, but Steam could really optimize its clients. They're incredibly slow to load and are not at all compatible with the UI themes of Windows and macOS.
Is gonna be fun to see this thing rise and fall more faster than the shit uplay is.
2) It's not really in Steam's interest to give you that license for free for games you already own, or to set up some kind of cross-buy where you automatically get it if you buy a PC copy. It'd cost them a ton of money and they have no reason to promote Android as a gaming platform alternative to PCs.
3) The juicy market on mobile isn't selling premium games like on Steam, it's selling in-app purchases in freemium games. I don't have an Android device handy but the first paid game on my iPhone's "Top Grossing Games" list is Minecraft at #44. The only other one in the top 150 is Reigns at #106. The premium game market on mobile is just not profitable enough to make a huge loss-leader like 2) above viable.
This feature would be more of a value add to Steam making the platform more attractive. If Steam on Android was big enough Valve could capture some of the free to play market as well, you're forgetting that even though Steam sells a lot of premium titles many of the most popular games are F2P already, roughly 20 of the top 100 player count games on Steam are F2P. Valve knows how many people have the Steam app installed on Android and it's fully possible that they don't consider the effort worth it for them. For me it'd be a nice way to manage updates for games that I already own on Steam, have APKs for (via Humble Bundle), but don't want to re-buy on Google Play just for automatic updates.
I'm sure it will make them a killing, though (not sarcasm)
Some men just want to watch the world burn!
These softwares are so terrible for the world. Terrible for any person trying to make a living programming and terrible for education.
I only realized recently how easy* it is to create realistic graphics using libre software. (I believe this is what draws most people to Unity - forget that it's hard to replicate their demos)
Implement the features I want
Forget about all the bloat I don't want
Get all the benefits of my custom software, favorite os and editor.
Sony has their own competing VR solution, though. That said, I seem to recall some talk about the Xbox One (maybe just their Scorpio refresh?) supporting the Rift, but I can't recall details offhand.
Not really though.
Remember, there's already GearVR, and that runs off of a mobile phone.
I was under the impression that Unity and Unreal were basically comparable engines - is this not the case?
I'm not 100% intune with game dev, but I always thought Unity was more indy-focused while Unreal was more big boy focused. I know off the back of my head that Unreal powers games like Street Fighter and Bioshock.
I can't really find any other $100MM+ budget games developed with Unity.
These are reasons why Unity is well liked among indies, and not necessarily only among non-technical people either. But if you have many millions to burn, other engines give you more room for customization, have more high-class sales teams, and have a workflow that is optimized to be familiar to artists with a AAA background.
I've tried Firewatch on both PC and PS4 and never gone through a playthrough that didn't have lag/performance issues even after the patches.
While Firewatch is often cited for what can be accomplished with Unity I don't think it's the gem to show the power of the engine when it can't even support the artistic vision the developers - they certainly know this engine well judging from talks they have given on the engine - tried to inject into it.
That's only a sample size of two though so not sure if people generally have problems with it or not.
Certainly doesn't mean that all the UE4 games are better in anyway, I loved Firewatch but it's not a crowning technical achievement.
The features are slowly getting on par, but Unreal does offer numerous add-on to the engine to optimise the game (one that caught my eye was a world map analysis).
I'm sorry, but do you really know what you're talking about? Unity is head and shoulders above UE4 these days, especially when it comes to lighting. For VR it's really not even a question that Unity is the only solid choice right now. Valve built the entire "The Lab" experience in Unity which is widely regarded as the finest VR experience thus far.
The article makes some vague hypothetical referfences to mobile, but doesn't explicitly say if Facebook's "desktop" platform is intended to support mobile devices right out of the gate.
>Meanwhile, these platforms’ support for mobile could allow Facebook to earn taxes on mobile games without owning its own mobile operating system. It once tried a different approach, building an HTML5 mobile web gaming platform called Project Spartan to sidestep the iOS App Store and Android’s Google Play. But developers dismissed it as underpowered compared to the native operating systems.
I had always expected Unity to build their own steam-like platform, but this short circuits things with an immediate huge userbase. Great move.
as much as i love steam it has always been borderline malware imo. sits in my system tray, uses my bandwidth, cpu cycles and memory etc... was even worse back when it refused to let you play your games without an internet connection too. :P
On the one hand it seems redundant, on the other they can at least share a single sign on and friends list for everything they do, being Facebook and all.
That same code runs unchanged on Android, PC (Windows, Linux, Mac), iOS (I've not tried this) and HTML (using the excellent GWT compiler). I'm using IntelliJ (it works but not as nice as Eclipse, unfortunately Android support seems better now in IntelliJ). Just pick the target and run.
Zuckerberg has a good idea but needs to use libGDX to make it a success. Call all stop and go libGDX. He won't succeed with just Unity.
As a side note, I don't use Facebook, can't stand it.
PS I'm not in favor of Facebook winning on this either, Steam rocks.
Do you really see this happening any time soon?
Can't wait to use a gaming platform engineered by the same people. Who cares about bugs in games anyways? Multiplayer gaming is very resilient.