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117 pointsDoolwind165 comments

You guys are not understanding this at all. Flash and Unity webplayer plugins are being blocked by browsers now. Flash still works for the most part, but Unity doesn't. Facebook is losing game players because of this, and new games are being built in Unity and not Flash, so it's harder for them to launch on Facebook.

This solves that problem by letting you compile your game for Facebook Gameroom straight from the Unity editor, and supports the Unity in app purchase plugin. So now that mobile game that you just built can easily launch on Facebook too with very little effort.

https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2016/11/01/unity-e...

Html5 / WebGL is not an option. It's super super slow and doesn't even work for half your players. Until web assembly is live and has good adoption, this Facebook Gameroom thing is going to be the best bet for launching your Unity game on Facebook.

Big studios can afford to develop Flash versions of their Unity mobile games just for Facebook, but small studios can't. So this is also great for that, to level the playing field a bit.

Edit: I'm actually fairly excited about this. We have a bunch of Unity mobile games out there but have launched none of them on Facebook because of the bullshit with the webplayer plugin and how terrible the WebGL stuff is right now. Now we can finally launch on Facebook! This is awesome for small Unity studios. Very very awesome.

I can also say with good confidence that not many people commenting are the target market here. You already have steam installed and you play games through that? Probably not the target market. If you play a ton of freemium games on your phone and/or you used to play freemium Flash games on Facebook - you are the demographic for Gameroom.

>Html5 / WebGL is not an option. It's super super slow and doesn't even work for half your players.

Any sources for this ? I know that WebGL adds overhead but for the simplistic kind of games (your run of the mill Unity games) you should have no trouble staying above 30 FPS, especially if you're smart about it and optimize to reduce draw calls. I would assume that most PCs out there have WebGL support by now (at least over 70%) considering how low the requirements are

>Until web assembly is live and has good adoption

I don't see how WebAssembly helps much - it primarily reduces the load time and download size with the binary encoding - but you can get similar levels of perf with ASM.JS and you still need to go trough same WebGL API as the DOM.

I've never been able to play a Unity/Unreal game compiled to HTML5, on a fairly beefy laptop which generally runs desktop games alright. Pure HTML5 games tend to work for me, but there's no real "game engine" for them along the same lines as Unity/Unreal, which many current mobile game developers use.

>"but there's no real "game engine" for them along the same lines as Unity/Unreal"

https://playcanvas.com/

Is that beefed up laptop by any chance a MBP ? Those have issues with WebGL mainly because of the retarded default pixelratio on it.

> I don't see how WebAssembly helps much - it primarily reduces the load time and download size with the binary encoding

This is the slowness I'm talking about. I should have been more clear. I did not mean slow frame rate, I meant abysmally slow loading times. The frame rate is actually fine, its just the loading time that makes it a non starter.

If you have a mobile game in Unity, you've already done the optimization to make it run at a good framerate in webGL on lower end hardware.

That's because big engines are filled with stuff that 90% of the games won't use (ie. they wouldn't care if it wasn't there) but because it's a general purpose engine it needs to implement all that and be flexible in the implementation, and the dead code elimination can't do the magic because most of it is runtime driven.

You can still use something smaller/purpose built and compile to ASM.JS and it runs just fine - I rolled my own scenegraph for a visualization app in C++ - it compiled down to ~120kb of gzipped ASM.JS if I compiled out logging, and it ran on both browsers and mobile, it was even loading and rendering fast enough (~30 FPS) on mobile browsers on low end phones (eg. Mali 450GPU, some old quad core mediatek chip) with shadow mapping.

You're definitely right about the feature bloat in Unity. We are probably only using 10% of the features, but like you said, we're still stuck with all that code. It must be a hard enough problem to solve that they didn't want to try and go down that route. Unity isn't dumb, I feel like they would go down that path if they felt it would be successful and was worth it.

> You can still use something smaller/purpose built

One of the advantages of using Unity though is that you don't have to write your game multiple times. Large studios can afford to do that, and they do. But for small studios, the ROI on porting your game to the web is not even close to positive, so hardly anyone does it.

>One of the advantages of using Unity though is that you don't have to write your game multiple times. Large studios can afford to do that, and they do. But for small studios, the ROI on porting your game to the web is not even close to positive, so hardly anyone does it.

But once you have C++ code base with OpenGL ES 2 you're basically "web ready" - porting is pretty straightforward with emscripten. The only porting is what you would have to do with an engine anyway (input/gameplay changes for web)

Please don't associate WebGL being bad with Unity being bad at exporting to WebGL...

PlayCanvas is generating WebGL games that run on mobile and download in only a few megabytes. You can generate great WebGL games today.

that doesn't solve the problem that webGL is both very slow, and is completely nonfunctional for a large amount of users.

https://www.khronos.org/webgl/wiki/BlacklistsAndWhitelists

Define large? You need a graphics driver more recent than Jan 1, 2009.

And slow compared to what? Flash? Canvas 2D?

lots of systems are that vintage or older, and do not have update-able graphics drivers due to being laptop OEM specific stuff (this was the case for all nvidia/ati mobile chips until recently, the OEM provided the driver, generic nvidia/ati drivers cannot be installed).

Compared to the unity browser plugin or a native executable.

Unity has basically said that they will not be able to make a good WebGL export until something like web assembly exists. It's just not possible. The entire Unity game engine + your game code compiled to javascript is too much for browsers to load in any reasonable time frame if you have to use plain javascript.

https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/webgl-roadmap.334408/

Memory issues

One of the biggest issues we see people run into with Unity WebGL right now is browsers (especially Chrome) running out of memory on trying to run Unity WebGL content. There are separate issues here:

The need to allocate a continuous block of XXX MB of space for the WebGL content. This is the memory Unity will operate on. The size of this can be configured in the WebGL Player settings. This needs to be large enough to fit all the objects and assets Unity will have loaded at a specific point in time. You can use the Memory Profiler in Unity to debug how this space is being used. This needs to be a continuous block of memory in the browser’s heap. If the browser is low on memory, or it’s heap is fragmented, it may fail allocating such a block of memory. Browsers needing too much memory to parse the JavaScript. The JavaScript code emitted by Unity for a WebGL player build is several orders of magnitude larger than other common uses of JavaScript, and JavaScript VMs may require a lot of memory to parse all this code. In particular, Chrome’s V8 sometimes runs into issues with this, causing it to crash, because it cannot allocate enough memory to parse the code. In Firefox, this is not as much of an issue, as Firefox uses asm.js to AOT compile the JavaScript, which has a smaller memory overhead.

For a lot of use cases, this is currently the biggest show-stopping issue on WebGL, and it is not an easy one to fix. Right now, the best we can do on our side is to emit less code. We have been experimenting with this at our last HackWeek, where we had a project to see how far we can reduce the output size of our WebGL export. At the end of the week, we were able to build a simple Unity project to WebGL with a distribution size of 1.2 MB, by improving code stripping, improving compiler settings, and removing things we don’t need among other things. While this value is somewhat theoretical, as some of these improvements were made given assumptions we cannot make in general, we did learn a lot from this week, and I expect to see a lot of changes which benefit build output size to be rolled back into Unity starting with version 5.2. Also, we have build tools to visualize which code modules got included in the build, how much code was generated for those, and what caused them to be included. We plan to make these tools available in a future Unity release (5.3 at earliest), which should greatly help users to analyze and optimize their build output sizes. Reducing code output size also helps a lot with startup times, as it reduces the delay needed to parse the code.

But, ultimately, we expect that these memory issues will be helped much more by advances in browser technology. All browsers are moving towards 64-bit builds, which lets them use larger address spaces. And, more importantly, Mozillla, Google and Microsoft are working on a new technology called WebAssembly which packages asm.js code into a bytecode format, which can then be very efficiently be compiled into native code. We are pretty excited about this, as this will greatly reduce load times, memory overhead and distribution size of WebGL content.

Don't get too excited, there is no discoverability other than what you pay for as far as Im aware.

Steam gives you 1m impressions when you launch, and 2.5m for updates. Not to mention nice exposure in new release section and fairly good search tools.

Gameroom has none of this.

>and 2.5m for updates

I'm assuming that's for major (content) updates only, right? Surely they're not giving every joe bloggs developer 2.5m free views because they fixed some minor bugs?

> Html5 / WebGL is not an option. It's super super slow and doesn't even work for half your players.

Really?

What about BrowserQuest? [0]

It works on my Surface RT, my crappy Android phone, hell its snappy running in Safari!

The limiting factor is WebSocket support, not HTML5. Canvas is more than good enough for complex games.

Unity's issue is that they never had a decent way of exporting to web, and now the architecture is more rigid, they're screwed.

But for game engines that work nicely, you have:

* Phaser [1] - Canvas & webGL * Pixie.js [2] - webGL with Canvas fallback (Check the gallery!)

Babylon.js would have made the list, but it is slow for me - which tells me that the implementation of the framework can be bad. Not that the technology is slow, as Pixie is blisteringly fast.

If I wanted to build a 3D for Facebook's market tomorrow, I'd choose Pixie.js. Not Unity. It'd be built as fast, and it'd run faster.

Unity is great for the desktop. They haven't conquered the web - their engine is just unsuitable. wasm isn't a solution for that, its just a stopgap.

[0] http://browserquest.mozilla.org/ [1] http://phaser.io/ [2] https://github.com/pixijs/pixi.js

You're comparing apples to oranges. Those javascript engines are just not as good as Unity. They have a fraction of the features and size of community.

Also, you're looking at the problem from the wrong angle. We aren't trying to build a game for the web. We're trying to build a game for mobile first, and then whatever platforms we can target outside of that is a bonus. We can't make sacrifices and use an inferior engine just because it does web builds better. Mobile is where the vast majority of the money is, not web.

If we were trying to build a game that ran equally well on the web and mobile, then sure, going with one of those javascript engines would be the way to go. But that just isn't the nature of the game industry right now. Most of the games using the javascript game engines are advergames or hobby projects or tech demos.

Now you're comparing something different.

I pointed out that webGL and Canvas can be good enough, not that it has feature completeness against Unity, or the same development adoption.

For the platform, we're talking about Facebook here. Web-first development makes sense. Web to app is trivial, and how things like Cordova work.

The engine may not be as featured, but it has everything a Facebook style game needs.

Particles, 2D physics, 2.5d rendering, raytracing for 3d.

Unity is just never going to run correctly within the web browser. They admit it, and the knowledge that the web player would break has been on the horizon a while.

I wouldn't say I'm looking at the platform the wrong way - I'd say the industry is. If you want web at all, you need to deal with JavaScript and its idiosyncrasies right off the bat.

At the end of the day, the company who can still embed their game is going to have a competitive advantage.

I always had the impression that webgl games run way smoother than unity games on chrome/ubuntu.

This perspective actually made sense of this release for me

WebGL is sufficient for 3D buildings in Google Maps but insufficient for Facebook's clash-of-three-in-a-rows?

The issue we were having with Unity's webGL exporter is that you would end up with tens of megabytes of javascript code (the entire unity 3d engine in javascript, plus all your game code!), not to mention your assets. So you get a fairly large download, and then your browser spends tens of seconds loading and parsing the javascript, if it even loaded without errors.

This is for an app that loads in 5 seconds on an iPhone 5.

And remember, the target demographic for Facebook games is mostly people with lower end hardware and not cutting edge browsers. So they probably wont have asm.js support, and the loading will be even slower for them on their older hardware.

I don't think Facebook ever grokked the concept of multiple personas - LinkedIn is for my work persona, Steam (and Origin, Twitch etc) is for my gaming persona, and on Twitter I can have different accounts for each.

As long as Facebook requires a single account with real identity, it will never be anything more than for my family & acquaintances persona. Most gamers I know feel the same... maybe we're in the minority, but maybe not. Be interesting to know how many Steam accounts are linked with Facebook as an indication of how this might play out (aside from the potential for exclusive titles etc).

I don't think you are a minority. the average gamer on a given popular game is usually going on about how fat your mom is in between rounds or on chat or whatever (it's worse than this, of course, i'm being nice).

Somehow, i don't think they are going to be up for tying that to their real identity.

There are two possibilities. This either massively improves the discourse on games like COD and the equivalent of every xbox live game ever. Or, people don't use it, because they don't want that. I"m going to go with the second.

Put another way: can you imagine the average gamer in COD wanting to tie their character "XXXAyeCarambeHarambeXXX420 to their real identity?

If the quality of comments on facebook are any indication I am not sure it will make a huge difference on discourse quality.

Or YouTube after Google plus is a better example. We've been there, done that, real names do not improve niceness.

These rude 'average gamers' you speak of are the vocal minority in my experience... Most of us are normal people.

In what game, precisely? Seriously, these platforms are all known for it. I've pretty most major triple-a multiplayer titles in the past 15 years, and they are all like this.

Do normal people exist? Sure. Are they the majority? Uh, no. :) It's not even a close contest.

This is even pretty easy to see. Pick 100 random top youtube videos of these games. Count the amount of racism, what have you going on in voice chat, team chat, whatever.

I say 100 just so one doesn't say "well, it's just these guys". It's everyone.

Do you actually play games or are you making things up from ill conceived stereotypes?

Yes. I play games enough that i have youtube videos of me and friends playing games that have millions of views, in fact.

Is this good enough for whatever bar you are trying to set?

(i'll note you didn't provide a retort to what i suggested, you instead just went to ad-hominem. So i'm going to assume you in fact, have no data that i'm wrong)

I've been almost exclusively playing Overwatch and Rocket League now for a good several months. The amount of offensive content isn't really any more than any other online community. It's rare. You get people who brag maybe, but no one has claimed to have sex with my mother in my entire time I have played that game. I've seen maybe a handful of racist terms dropped here and there, but those people are either chastised or ignored.

Idk, I just don't see what you see. What do you play?

Average gamers in CoD are not average gamers. So there's that.

Pick any triple A title with multiplayer.

Haven't noticed this at all on Titanfall 2 (pc)

I have multiple disparate 'personas' largely because I consider myself to be a fairly creative intellectual who is prone to considering and defending unpopular opinions that require nuance and maturity to understand. And I don't want some psychotic teenager thinking they're doing the world a favor by tracking me down and murdering me because they can't handle verbal disagreement appropriately.

Everything you said there is reasonable, but the way you expressed it is very off putting.

Everything I say is off-putting to someone. I'm inclined say your comment is off-putting, but I'm actually fine with letting people feel what they feel without leveraging emotional obligations at, or demanding hedging-rituals or pointless niceties from each other.

Though this criticism is really just a difference of culture: the ability to separate the useful truths from pleasant feelings is a high virtue where I come from.

I don't get it. What's off putting to you about this?

They are likely aware of this but know it would be too hard to get enough traction for a new brand. If they were really serious about it they would probably have to buy something with traction.

They actually already run one via Oculus.

As a counterpoint, for the few games I do play, I far prefer to use my real Facebook identity. Words with Friends in particular is most fun when I'm playing against my real friends. I also really like QuizUp.

Dinky little mobile games like words with friends fall into a different category than pc games. They are time-killers, and your gaming identity is not tied to an avatar that kicks ass in a virtual world. Your real identity for mobile games is simply to make finding someone to play the dinky game with easier on your phone.

The part which should bother a real world gamer is the MBA marketing pitch which goes:

"CONNECTING TO FACEBOOK, THE EA WAY.

Real world studies have shown that people are x% less likely to act out of troll if their real world ID is known

With Facebook we get significantly more targeting data or our demographics and potentially data on their income/parents."

I understand this, but this is a big gaming category, and may be the ultimate place that Facebook Gameroom succeeds in.

Netflix's change from their own review system to FaceBook killed it for me and angered their user base (which didn't effect them of course).

Facebook definately doesn't get the idea of different social landscapes for different aspects of life.

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/get-to-know-netflix-and-its-new-...

Did they? Or do they not care?

How infuriatingly presumptious. The page has a single screenshot, a meaningless blurb, and an an "install now" button - as if I'm going to automatically download and install every single thing Facebook announces.

How about even a bare-minimum attempt at explaining what this is all about? (I mean, yes, I know how to google and figure it out, but should I have to?)

It looks like one of those game pop-up ads - only full-screen. Yeah, I am going to install you crappy client to download your crappy freemium games.

Crappy client that will then take over my PC and give you all my data.

I saw that one of the screenshots from the limited number they had was Willy Wonka Slots. So that's a no.

Is it just me or is the "Install Now" button broken? I'm on a Mac but I would've assumed I could download the .exe file.

On my Mac, it gives me a popup that has a "if the download doesn't start automatically..." link that gives me the EXE.

It literally says "Available for Windows 7 and above" with an unmistakable Windows logo :).

Maybe they meant that it would still just download the EXE even if it was on a non-compatible system.

That's exactly what I meant.

I'd say macOS is "above" Windows 7. ;-)

Evidently not if you want to play games. ;-)

If you have to ask, you're not the consumer they're targeting.

They rebranded!

This was previously 'Facebook Games Arcade Beta' [1], then officially unnamed, but occasionally referred to as 'Facebook Arcade' [2].

At the time TechCruch wrote about this in August [3], it was less clear what their gaming portal ambitions were, and I lamented why they'd push this product with the Facebook brand so strongly instead of de-emphasizing it in favor of a different brand [4]. Since then, they had a partial change of heart -- the URL for this site is still through Facebook, but on the splash page, the only mention of Facebook is the [f] in the 'Gameroom' logo.

[1] http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/facebook-games-arcade-beta... [2] https://www.facebook.com/arcade [3] https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/18/facebook-desktop-game-plat... [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12313908#12314672

I disagree, I still very much feel the Facebook brand through this product.

The URL, plus the title of the tab, plus the recognizable FB logo next to the primary title of the product, and then it's still called the 'Facebook Gameroom' in the tab of the application. http://imgur.com/a/XIZVX

This looks like a glorified browser for games that are already playable on browser. It doesn't seem to be optimized for gaming at all (it even feels laggier). Is the purpose of it just to increase discoverability of Facebook games?

This is disappointing. When I read Facebook bought Gameroom.com a couple weeks ago, I expected something related to their VR platform. Not this.

Games are less playable in the browser now than they were 2 years ago though. Unity webplayer and Flash are both getting blocked by browsers now. I imagine this Gameroom app supports both of those.

Edit: Yeah, look at this: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2016/11/01/unity-e...

So, now we have a way to target the web before web assembly is live and adopted.

Thank you! I see the rationale behind this now. I still think the approach is wrong, though.

It's even weirder that they've launched this platform completely separate from the Oculus platform. I understand the marketing reasons for this. Oculus has to not require a Facebook login, while Gameroom does, Oculus is VR only, etc. But you'd think maybe Gameroom could have Oculus support without too much blow back from Reddit?

Facebook seems to be following the time honored big tech company tradition of having different business units completely reinvent the wheel working on the same set of features in parallel for no good reason.

Who would want to tarnish the Oculus brand with Facebook's "social" slot games?

And besides, Oclulus have done enough to tarnish the brand themselves anyway.

Seems like a solid incremental addition to oculus in another news cycle.

Very sad this isn't turning my room into a game.

There's always the HTC Vive for that.

> From shooters to strategy, builders to bingo, find your game in Gameroom, designed for PC gaming.

I just can't see this competing with Steam and Origin. It took years for Origin to get as much acceptance as it has in the PC market, and it started with AAA games people wanted - not "Oz: Broken Kingdom" and "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory Slots". Origin still gets crap because it isn't Steam.

Is this the PC equivalent of Messenger, designed to give Facebook total access to your system?

Facebook messanger gives Facebook total access to your computer?

I guess the parent comment means that messenger takes a lot of permissions on mobile.

The android version? I've only used the Windows 10 and iOS versions, so I am not aware of what permissions it asks for.

For Android (and for Windows Phone) it requires permissions to pretty much everything. It's pretty evil in that regard.

Every last permission it requests is associated with a reasonable functional requirement. It may never make use of the components it requests permission to (eg: sending and receiving SMS, which many users don't want to do with Messenger) and in newer Android versions, you can grant (or not) permissions on an ad hoc basis. Nothing 'evil' about it.

I mean, I'm looking through the permissions now and don't see anything that's not arguably needed to make it work:

- Calendar (it can set up reminders in group chats and calendar)

- Camera/Microphone (to take pictures and videos to put in group chat)

- Contacts (to get a list of contacts! Also see SMS capability below)

- Location (you can send your location in a chat)

- SMS (it can act as an SMS client as well as FB chat)

- Storage (store received pics/videos, and access existing pics/videos)

- Telephone (to detect when you get an incoming call so it can handle any active activities (think if you're already on a video call)).

And as others have noted, you can disable most of these if you don't want them on recent Android versions.

thankfully this is no longer true in newish andoird - you can disable or not grant most of the permissions

It's all related to features in the app at least, it's not like they're asking for things they don't need to make all the features work. I might call SMS unnecessary but that's because I don't really want to use it for SMS.

It's not uncommon for Android apps to ask for permissions to everything.

If you download the windows 10 desktop app, it has just as much access as any other non-admin metro app.

This is old FUD.

I'm really getting tired of Facebook et. al trying to insert themselves into every facet of my existence.

I'll keep using Steam and Gog. Steam is pretty bleh, but it does the job and I don't have to put up with Facebook.

Personally I think Steam is one of the best game platform (for a lack of a better word). It is fast, easy to use, nice sales/cheap in general, downloads are quick. While on the other side Playstation store is the exact oposite of what I just wrote.

> It is fast

my main complaint is that I find it pretty clunky and slow.

edit: The UI, not downloads. Browsing the store is usually not that pleasant, switching tabs, etc... Downloads usually cap out around 40MB/sec on my connection. Which is fine.

Really? I'm comparing with others I've tested here and it seems by far to be the best available at the moment. Downloads always seem to work, you can restart them and it actually continues straight on instead of some others that start at the previous block of information (sometimes half a gigabyte before). You have skins that make the client look actually rather nice [0] and you have a game library like no other. It combines the size of library that contains every game you want, with the limit of only having decent games.

Desura, UPlay, etc. seem to have little to no comparability in options, versatility and ease of use.

[0] https://puu.sh/s3ivj/c13e709ead.png

Some of it is highly dependant on your internet connection. But the games library seems to be snappy with 300 games. I find that updates can run extremely slow though, 1-2MB patch taking 5 minutes to download!

I remember when Steam WAS really horrible. The green client ran so poorly and was extremely slow at updating anything,

I'd argue steam has never stopped sucking, but it's always been reliable. I'll take reliability over usability any day when money's involved.

To paraphrase Churchill, Steam is the worst form of online gaming store imaginable ... apart from all the others.

The big online stores (Steam,Origin,UPlay) themselves are pretty interchangeable feature-wise. I buy most stuff on Steam just because I already have a ludicrous amount of games on it. It's pretty much inertia now.

> It is fast, easy to use, nice sales/cheap in general, downloads are quick.

I feel like we're using different clients. My steam client is slow, clunky and often gets in the way of games. Yes, the sales are cheap, and the downloads are quick, but that's irrelevant to the client.

How are the downloads fast? Mine seems stuck on 3-5Mb/s...

Make sure a data center close to you is selected in settings. Sometimes their region detection is incorrect.

Thanks for that. I always assumed its just that slow.

I use both, point noted but objectively... so what if Sony's store is abysmal? Most gamers go for AAA titles that they hear about elsewhere, who cares if the store is hard to search? They 'pre download' the game so who cares about the speed?

Finally, the vast majority of time in the gaming experience is not spent in the store. It's all about the content and the exclusives. Sony has invested heavily here.

Out of curiosity, why do you say steam is "pretty bleh"?

I see a lot of people who claim steam is bad but I've never actually seen any people give real criticism beyond "b-but it's drm and is therefore inherently evil!1!" (which personally, I feel is a pretty dismissive opinion to hold; DRM is only an issue when it becomes one, and as a pretty damn experienced consumer in the steam ecosystem with over 1k games in my library, steam as DRM is not)

I actually think steam is a fantastic piece of software, and while a little rough around the edges in places, it's not even remotely close to the buggy, crashy and generally non-functional turd that existed before HL2 released. (But hey, you could play chess with your friends when the friends network was up...!)

I feel the next few years are going to be really big for valve - even if they don't release any new games - their recent (and upcoming) updates to steam have shown that they actually care about giving people real, use-case backed reasons to use it beyond cheap games. One example being the Dualshock 4 support that is currently being publicly beta'd. Sure I could use DS4Windows or Inputmapper - but why even bother anymore, steam now has the capability to do (almost) everything they do, and a lot of things they couldn't even imagine doing.

If you don't own a steam controller you've probably never seen the controller configuration interface - but take my word for it, it's fucking fantastic, even better now that DS4 support exists. It's far more user-friendly than any of the multitude of scarlet-crush-driver-based solutions available for using a DS4 on a PC and at the same time, infinitely more powerful than them too. Why would I even bother running yet another application alongside steam anymore when all the functionality is built right into the client.

A lot of people claim that valve don't care - I think that's simply not true; people just love to pick at all the flaws while never giving the good (which far, far, FAR outweighs the bad) the amount of praise it rightly deserves, and if even after everything I've said here anyone still thinks valve don't care? I'm sorry, but I can only assume you're either naïve, stupid, or both.

TL;DR: Valve have revolutionised PC gaming and continue to innovate inside it. Yes they're slow and sometimes far too quiet about it, but that's no reason to claim they're/steam is bad. Like the big man himself said, "These things, they take time."

Steam, like Caesar's Gaul and Half-Life, is divided into three parts.

There's the in-game section: overlay, matchmaking, DRM checking. This actually works very well because people hardly ever notice it. Starting a game with your friends nearly always works. Achievements work.

There's the thing you get if you click on "Steam". The store and library. This is pretty terrible, especially the store; everything is so slow because it's running in an embedded bad browser of some sort. "Big picture" mode seems to be OK, but I've not used it much.

Then there's the company and business model. Everyone else in this space has focused on using DRM to squeeze customers by preventing them from doing reasonable things. Steam is DRM with very reasonable portability, a backup feature, and (very important) regular big discounts. Without the Steam sales, people would still hate it.

Okay, I can understand gripes with steam's chromium implementation, it can be pretty bad at times and is pretty outdated too - what would normally just cause an 'aw snap tab crash page' (for lack of a better term) in chrome normally causes the overlay to crash and reload entirely. As for the store website itself, that's supposedly getting a refresh 'soon' so any issues there may have a resolution on the horizon.

The library itself I can't really see any issues with, it's searchable, filterable, sortable (in the tabular view only) and can be categorised however you like. I wouldn't say it's slow or unresponsive either - if anything it's probably the snappiest part of the main client interface, which makes sense given it's also the only part of the main interface that isn't a browser pane.

> Out of curiosity, why do you say steam is "pretty bleh"?

The app is probably the most unpleasant piece of software I use daily. Trying to navigate around is slow and at times frustrating.

> A lot of people claim that valve don't care

A lot of people say Valve doesn't give a shit about support or making the steam application better. Both things are true. Valve does great things for gaming, but they are far from flawless.

Steam is bleh compared to Gog? Huh?

This feels and loads games like my moms Pogo games. Not a good start.

It's made for your mom. Sounds like a good start to me.

What's wrong with your mom?

Origin, steam, battle net, uplay...

And now gameroom.

Is steam so profitable this makes sense? What possible motive does FB, one of the largest companies in the world, have to compete? The revenues should be paltry.

I doubt this is about direct revenue. This is about further cementing that "Facebook is The Internet" to as many people as possible. Facebook wants to know and control everything you do on your computer, on your mobile device, and on the internet at large. From all of that, they then earn the real revenue via advertisements.

One theory: Facebook most important metric is session duration, the only part where a big chunk of people spend more time than on Facebook, is on videogames.

It is estimated Steam made $1.5 billion in revenues in 2014, and $3.5 billion in 2015.

If you assume Valve gets 30% of that number, and remember Valve is a privately held company of about 360 employees, that is an impressive figure.

>>Is steam so profitable this makes sense?

We don't have the numbers obviously, but Steam must be so profitable that Valve is primarily a software distributor these days. Over the past six years, they've released only two titles (Portal 2 in 2011 and Dota 2 in 2013), and Half-Life 3, a game that is guaranteed to sell millions upon millions of copies, isn't even on the horizon.

I don't think they really care about earning money from their original games. They give out team fortress 2 for free, and has been actively maintaining it all these 9 years. They sell all value game as a bundle for like $20 last year.

On the other hand. Others like battle.net, origin, uplay are just other game companys trying not to give away 30% cut of their new hot game by selling at valve's platform. They will probably lose more from the 30% cut, than the potential customer they would lose selling only on their platform. I totally understand them, I just couldn't be bother to buy them (except blizzard)

Nevertheless, it's just PC games, not a big market. Nowhere compare to apple's iphone games or facebook's web games.

> Nevertheless, it's just PC games, not a big market. Nowhere compare to apple's iphone games or facebook's web games.

Yeah, only estimated to be about 27 billion in 2015[1]. Chump change. (I'll include this aside as a definitive indicator of sarcasm, for those incapable of detecting it accurately on their own).

1: https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/global-games-market-wil...

This is just called Free to Play. Look up how much money TF2 made on hats.

Yeap. I know many kids who rather spend their allowances and gifts on TF2 items than on new games. Hats, weapons, taunts, all in different combinations for maximum profit.

That's a really great point - do you have any insight into whether Valve's headcount reflects a shift in priorities to software distribution vs game design?

Well, steam now makes hardware as well[1], and invested in VR research quite a bit IIRC, so it's not like they've decided to become a distribution company exclusively.

1: http://store.steampowered.com/hardware/

The target audience for Gameroom is not the same as the target audience for Steam; it's the people who play Farmville or Words with Friends - not the product of Triple-A game producers.

Think parents of Steam players, if not Steam players themselves. Sure, there will be some bleedover - after a long day of ganking noobs and insulting moms, some people think it's nice to sit down to a casual game and buy a vowel or a cow.

If FB can make Gameroom stick around, it will be profitable. Farmville has stuck around for 7 years now and most people would snerk at the idea that it's "a real game". But it's target audience doesn't care about the snark. They have fun.

The real worry here should be how FB is losing it's focus with the shopping pages and the social pages and the game hub and the blah and the blah.

You know, just like what happened with AOL and Yahoo. They were big for a long time, and then they suddenly don't matter much anymore.

Steam makes more money per employee than Apple.

It's looks to be pretty damn profitable. Here's an article from 2011, which indicates some people value Valve between $2-$4 billion[1]. That's for a private company with ~360 employees according to wikipedia (although they only have.102 people listed on their company page). In 2015, they look to have taken in about 3.5 billion in revenue[2].

1: http://www.forbes.com/sites/oliverchiang/2011/02/15/valve-an...

2: https://medium.com/steam-spy/steam-sales-in-2015-2e81a6bb0f5...

Facebook made a lot of its early revenue off games people were playing via their platform. Over time that dropped off and now they make the revenue pushing ios/android apps.

I guess that it is a long term play to try and get some of that control back.

If FB is looking forward in regards to VR, having their own platform in which friends connect and play (and watch ads) together in a Facebook-hosted VR world could be something of real impact.

My problem is that I opened the website, read the description, and I still don't know what this does. Is it a launcher for my PC games? Why the hell would I want another one?

Haha, finally I can have a desktop version of FarmVille.

Really tho, this is emblematic of the endemic problem with tech monoliths misunderstanding their audience. It somehow reminds me of a planning deck I once saw for supporting "party planning" mode where the actual use case was "porn mode" but the bizdev had to make it pc.

Didn't Yahoo do this more than 10 years ago? I remember playing a lot of checkers as a lab monitor in college.

Facebook could do something so powerful and fun by seamlessly combining their social platform and games... But this is what they've come up with?

This kinda happened in 2007... hence Words With Friends, FarmVille, etc. In retrospect it seems bizarre that random developers were able to publish updates with our own icons to the main Newsfeed.

I suppose I am speaking of a far more integrated portal for friends to play casual games together. More realtime than the newsfeed volley of 2007. If Facebook could create a really nice lobby platform and then have a handful of casual games, board games, card games etc. It would be very locked down and focused on friendly gaming, not the spamcity that was/is "Facebook games".

In case anyone else is curious, you can't actually play any games unless you have the Facebook Apps Platform enabled, and you can't play any games unless you share public profile info.

What I can't figure out is who these game developers are and what they do with that info (beyond displaying my name in multiplayer games). Can it be used to build remarketing lists, etc?

My game is there, and we don't have the Facebook stuff enabled so it doesn't ask for permission when it launches.

But of course, instead we ask you to make a custom account for our game so you can log in and out on different platforms.

* No feature list * No game list * Confusing as to what this has to do with "rooms" * Demands I download a web app!?!??!!?

Go home FB. You're drunk.

PC only. is this 2004?

more specifically, Windows only.

So... 2001

or 2020, when mac is left abandoned in the trash heap in favor of iJackets

"Its says windows 7 or better", so I assumed all macOS versions are supported. :)

It says "Designed for PC Gaming", why would it release elsewhere?

What it says it is and what it is/will be are two completely different things. If anything, I'd say mac users probably fall into the demographic of people who would actually want to play the kinds of games this will harbour.

Windows only? Also no way to see what games exist without downloading?

Taking a client on windows approach.

I wonder if this has Unity webplayer & Flash runtimes built into it so it will work even though browsers block those plugins now.

Edit: yes! https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2016/11/01/unity-e...

>It can tie users deeper into the Facebook identity layer, making it harder for them to ditch the social network

It's all about ecosystem lock-in for these tech giants. Their agenda-driven ways are not compatible with what gamers expect from a good platform.

It's why so much hate is directed towards services such as Origin and even worse, Uplay - which needs to run in addition to the Steam client. Or any service requiring its own "launcher". To its credit, Planet Coaster recently ditched its own launcher (Frontier Launchpad) and took the game to Steam. Frontier Launcher can now be uninstalled. Awesome. Planet Coaster is awesome btw.

Unless this "Gameroom" service allows sign-up via email address and avatar/handle/nickname identity, I'll be giving it a miss. And even if does offer third party authentication, I'll still likely give it a miss.

A board game room is a better place to play.

Seems like the comments here are slamming Facebook for this, but I think sometimes you have to take a step back and realize you might not be the target audience, and that products/services typically launch before getting the proposition spot on.

The landing page is certainly light on text, looks like it's got nothing to do with Oculus, and it's Windows-only, but perhaps Facebook are approaching this as a start-up would? I am certain Facebook will test variants of that landing page, get installs from other parts of their platform, and if going beyond an MVP, add Oculus stuff and other platforms.

I'm not about to install it either, but I bet they get tens (maybe hundreds) of millions of installs before the end of 2016. From a start-up perspective, I find this type of launch more fascinating because I can watch them iterate.

Hacker news, where having a brand name means all products you released have to be fully featured, documented, well marketed, omni-platform and take full advantage of the "obvious" synergy with your existing products. Otherwise, it's clearly total rubbish.

Maybe ah… this was built and released by a small team who may or may not go on to iterate on the implementation pending collection and evaluation of usage data. Perhaps you would like to comment on this as if it's an early iteration? Maybe you could take the painful step of recognizing that the people who built it are people; individual human lives with limited time and resources and therefore attempted to strike a balance with respect to resources spent in an effort to release something, limited for sure but compelling.

  > Maybe you could take the painful step of recognizing that the people who built it are people; individual human lives with limited time and resources [...]

Except it's made by Facebook (not a small team of indie developers pouring their heart and soul), and it's not new or even in demand, since we have steam, origin and gog.

Is Facebook GameRoom the new Yahoo Games?

Exactly what I felt. As always - history repeats itself.

Hey, what do you know. My new game Blight of the Immortals is already up and running in Gameroom. I didn't have to do anything!

(Previously had the game inside one of those Facebook canvases. )

Why is this Windows-compatible only?

If it's targeting PC gamers, there's almost no reason to release for anything but Windows.

That's unfair I think. It's a perfectly fine idea that has been executed poorly multiple times.

It's not failed for a lack of stores on Linux. Both Steam and GOG sell Linux games, The gaming ecosystem on Linux just doesn't compare to that on Windows. Driver support isn't there, AAA/AA game support isn't there, backwards compatibility isn't there. It is much better in recent years than ever but I think this is a knock on effect from the general resurgence of PC gaming as a whole.

Trust me, I'd love it if this weren't the case but Linux gaming has been pushed as least as long as the Linux desktop, and I don't see either getting much more traction. It's a chicken and egg problem.

This is not going to end nicely. Forget about the fact that Steam is pretty much insurmountable for a second, but this a space Facebook doesn't belong in.

They havn't put a lot of work into it I dont think. Its just a re-skin of Facebook itself in something like Electron.

This is obviously a strong play by Facebook taken from the WeChat playbook. Furthermore, it helps connect the dots with their Oculus purchase. Believe it or not, any company... even Facebook, can brand themselves as a gaming/entertainment company over time. It was not too long ago that Facebook was the de-facto platform for games such as Farmville.

Looks like they changed the name from facebook arcade. The help in my language refers to it as arcade.

Great. A furthering of the attempted fragmentation of my gaming license management software.

For the same reason that I don't buy things on UPlay and Origin, I won't be buying things on Gameroom.

I think PC gamer hate Facebook, or barely find it relevant? True?

I don't think the ratio of Facebook hater to Facebook user is significantly different among PC gamers than it is among any other technical crowd (HN, for example).

I am a PC gamer, and I use Facebook for some things and don't think they're inherently evil. I also don't think this product is meant for me.

Your aunt and mother will soon be chatting over messanger while they compete in a candy crush tournament, all with a browser on chromebooks. They're not here for you hardcore gamers. They will come for you later,once they have dominated... oh wait, Windows only? Haha haha, never mind.

No thanks.

Agreed. I hope it won't end up with another platform I don't want to own/be part of thet gets exclusives. It probably will.

Considering the demographic, I bet they are trying to be steam for casual gamers, rather hoping to enter an entrenched market with a 400 lb gorilla of a leader.

Though maybe this is an oculus play.

Oh I didn't think of Oculus. That makes quite a bit of sense, actually. That would give them a chance to roll their own policy for ads in games, among other things. In combination with VR it will be interesting to see what will come out of that, despite not being part of the target audience myself.

The problem is that Oculus is not hugely popular and faces stiff competition from other VR hardware. It would be silly to "need Oculus" for a Facebook game. Wouldn't that be a turning point in gaming.. requiring Facebook hardware before you can enter a building in a VR world. I guess that's where it's headed, and would be very sad to have that fragmentation in VR.

It wouldn't surprise me if that is how it starts, before consolidating and becoming a more homogenous industry down the road. I agree, it would be sad. I can imagine the majority of people on HN would probably prefer open and less locked in alternatives.

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