Steam has a competitor from Facebook. The social network has announced the launch of a beta for developers of a platform on which you can run not only Flash and HTML5 games, but also native projects.
The new platform is called Facebook Gameroom. To launch it, you need to download a client that immediately loads the user’s game profile from Facebook.
It is assumed that already now in the client you can play any games that are played within the browser in Facebook, as well as in the first 20 native projects. But not all of them are being launched now (out of a dozen projects that the editors tried to launch, only two have opened).
The client supports many game formats,” the Facebook developer site says. Here are the formats that are currently working:
- materials in HTML5 or Flash format hosted on the game developer’s server;
- separate files .exe for Windows added to the ZIP archive and hosted on Facebook (native Gameroom games);
- Unity WebGL files added to the ZIP archive and hosted on Facebook.
The size of the application for free hosting of games on Facebook should not exceed 200 MB (but the social network clarifies that in some cases it may allow you to increase the file to 500 MB).
Now you can create native games for the platform only on Unity 5. The latest version of the engine supports the creation of builds for the client. However, the support is not complete yet. For example, Unity IAP does not currently make payments to Facebook Gameroom.
Source: Facebook