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Comment by Daniel_Marcos | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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