
Facebook is building its own Steam-style desktop gaming platform with Unity - prostoalex
https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/18/facebook-desktop-game-platform/
======
dave_sullivan
Steam has succeeded (I think) because they've managed to walk a thin line w/
drm and not screwing up the user experience too much.

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.

~~~
mevile
Facebook's Oculus has already tried to go the way of exclusives and walled
gardens so I doubt it will take off. PC gamers are an opinionated noisy bunch
and they will cause all kinds of drama for Facebook if they aren't as open as
Steam. I don't really get this anyway. Steam works. Origin and Battle.net
kinda make sense since those are the publisher's platform, and there's also
GoG's Galaxy. There's really not any more room for another competitor.

~~~
eswat
> Steam works

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.

~~~
mevile
There already is competition. GoG's Galaxy. It's great. Nobody I know uses it.
Not a single streamer on twitch I've ever watch uses it. I'm fine with
competition too, but not from Facebook. They've already fucked up with the
Oculus store and I don't trust them anyway. Facebook is an unscrupulous
advertisement company that turns intimate personal information into pay per
click ad dollars.

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.

~~~
serge2k
> I'd even go so far as to say Valve not caring is a good thing.

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.

~~~
n0w
What's wrong with DotA2??

~~~
grogenaut
For this person it's likely that it's not League or HOTS... or to make the
standard joke... it's actually challenging and for adults instead of an ez
mode toy for kids.

------
fossuser
This seems like a smart play and necessary if they're going to take Steam/Vive
head on in VR.

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.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Well, they're doing a very poor job with the Oculus store, why would this one
be any different?

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.

~~~
onewaystreet
> 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

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.

~~~
aphextron
>The Rift has outsold the Vive 10 to 1. And the Gear has sold over a million
units.

Completely false. Vive has outsold CV1 2:1 so far. Best approximate numbers
right now are 50,000 Rifts to 100,000 Vives.

~~~
onewaystreet
Where are you getting that 50k Rifts number from? Every estimate on Rift sales
has it at around 500k.

~~~
c0nfused
The last numbers I saw were here: [http://www.roadtovr.com/htc-vive-sales-
figures-data-100000-s...](http://www.roadtovr.com/htc-vive-sales-figures-
data-100000-steamspy-data/)

------
Mikeb85
I'm beginning to get sick of the Unity monoculture. All their games have the
same feel to them, which I can only describe as 'sluggish'. Truly ambitious
games built with Unity inevitably wind up buggy as well, since doing anything
outside the box requires hacks and workarounds.

~~~
happyslobro
Yep, if there was ever a game that deserved a custom game engine, it would be
Kerbal Space Program. The version of Unity that they used constrained them to
3.5 gb, and 32 bit floating point coordinates, in a game that deserves a true
scale solar system.

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.

~~~
mxfh
The engine itself can only do so much, if you don't want to write a whole new
graphics library too.

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...](http://outerra.blogspot.de/2012/11/maximizing-depth-buffer-range-
and.html)

------
tntniceman
Valve/Steam solved a problem that the PC gaming community faced in late 2003,
namely streamlined distribution of online content. Now there seem to be
countless fighters in the ring; I can only see this experiment ending in
either a small fandom based on exclusivity deals or smoldering out quickly.

~~~
TrevorJ
Consumers don't really need multiple steam-like platforms either. I don't see
the market supporting more than a couple. It's a steep hill to climb for
anyone who want's to compete with Steam.

~~~
paulmd
Steam, and GoG are the only companies who seem to make it stick.

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.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlefield_2#Booster_packs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlefield_2#Booster_packs)

~~~
theandrewbailey
There's actually lots of Ubisoft games on Origin.[0] I've also seen The
Witcher and lots of indie games on there, too. I poked around Uplay a bit, but
that appears to be 100% their own.

[0] [https://www.origin.com/en-
us/store/browse/ubisoft](https://www.origin.com/en-us/store/browse/ubisoft)

------
niftich
I feel like if this Steam-clone were called 'Oculus Play' or some other name
more-distanced from 'Facebook', I'd be less uneasy with it. I know in all
likelihood it's an irrelevant distinction from a data harvesting standpoint,
but the implied expansion of the 'Facebook' brand from its original locus of a
yearbook-style personal page makes me uncomfortable.

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.

------
haydenlee
As seen in the comments here there's a strong reaction of "why would I ever
use this instead of Steam?" from the existing gamer crowd. Yet from Facebook's
perspective even if _not one_ Steam user jumps ship, they could theoretically
still grow their platform to 10x the size of Steam based off just their
existing Facebook userbase. That's tremendous upside and seems completely
worth the risk.

~~~
serg_chernata
I have to agree, the sheer numbers of people Facebook has access to could
crush Steam in terms of active users. I love Steam and think Facebook has
enough of my information as it is but you can't ignore these numbers.

~~~
usrusr
Why can't you ignore them? The Catholic church also has a very high number of
users and you surely ignore those wrt competing with Steam. The Vatican is
certainly in an even worse position to convert users to game shoppers, but I
don't think that Facebook is that far ahead in this. People have pretty much
stabilised in how they expect their relationship with Facebook to be and any
offers to extend it to new grounds are likely to be ignored. When Farmville
happened, Facebook users were a lot more experimental.

------
atombath
This is going to end up being the junk shed of game distribution. In
everything it does, it seems FB's mediocre content curation/distribution is
'good enough' for its users. It's the fast food of the Internet, after all.

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.

------
spdy
I do not see myself moving away from steam anytime soon. Its easy and works.

~~~
devopsproject
They will bundle a killer app with it, just like steam did with half life 2.

~~~
overcast
I REALLY do not see Facebook getting the killer app like Half Life 2, or
Battlefield like mentioned below on Origin. Besides, that was a completely
different time, before anything even existed. Steam didn't pull users away
from the number one software distributor, to become number one. It was more of
a killer app, just to adopt the concept.

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.

~~~
ssalazar
> I REALLY do not see Facebook getting the killer app

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.

~~~
r00fus
So you're guessing they'll end up like Microsoft's Xbox division - spending
billions to place a solid constant 2nd place, and still not being net revenue
positive after a decade.

------
SadWebDeveloper
> Will require facebook login to play games

Is gonna be fun to see this thing rise and fall more faster than the shit
uplay is.

~~~
na85
If there's one thing I want, it's my wife's friends getting spammed with
Facebook notifications about the fact that I got the Monster Kill achievement
in Hello Kitty Island Adventure.

~~~
mrcoleman
Now I won't have to tell my boss that I need a sick day because I was up all
night playing Civ. He'll already know....

------
msl09
On a related note, why doesn't steam install into android? It seems to me like
there are hundreds of dozens of android games on steam(literal ports from
android to PC/MAC) but there is no way for the player to install the android
version on their phones, unless if they also buy from Playstore the games they
already have on Steam.

~~~
tomku
1) Owning a Windows/Mac/Linux copy of a game does not mean you implicitly have
a license to the Android version, even if it's a "literal port".

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.

~~~
Impossible
I think many developers would opt into giving Android versions of their game
to owners on Steam if they have an Android port. If this wasn't the case then
something like the Humble Mobile Bundle, which regularly gives you DRM free
PC\Mac\Linux + Steam keys + Android APKs would not exist. At this point I
think there is a large backlog of titles on Steam that have Android ports, and
like with Mac and Linux developers would add those to Steam to make their
older titles more attractive to new buyers.

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.

------
asgardiator
There's no way this can go wrong. If Facebook is known for anything, it's
moldbreaking and open innovation.

------
kelvin0
Steam is an awesome plaform that doesn't try to piss the user off (looking at
you EA Origin and UBI Play). I don't think anyone can outdo this right now (at
least on PC). This FB portal will probably also require a FB? Another fail if
this is the case.

------
shmerl
You mean Facebook want to get into game distribution business? The last thing
we need, is another DRM ridden distributor that also pushes for distributor
lock-in features (like they did with Oculus initially). I buy my games through
GOG.

------
happyslobro
Facebook. Unity. Yuck.

I'm sure it will make them a killing, though (not sarcasm)

~~~
JayHost
Well said! Haha yeah, you've got the two most bloated proprietary apps working
together. Woooo!!

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.

------
cwkoss
Unity games are not going to strongly compete with Steam. Unity engine just
isn't performant enough. I think this is more for mobile-style casual games:
think flash games with 3D instead of 2D graphics. Will probably make a chunk
of change from bored homemakers, but it isn't going to pull marketshare from
'PC master race'-type Steam gamers.

~~~
fossuser
Unity is powerful enough for 3D open world games
([http://www.firewatchgame.com/](http://www.firewatchgame.com/)).

I was under the impression that Unity and Unreal were basically comparable
engines - is this not the case?

~~~
nemothekid
> _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.

~~~
Udo
Like any engine, Unity has its unique advantages and drawbacks. A small dev
team can cover a lot of ground using Unity, and some programming tasks are
actually quite pleasant with it. Some people have asserted in this thread that
Unity's performance is deficient, but it's easy to write games that run
smoothly on a large gamut of devices, whereas UnrealEngine's IDE and even
almost empty scenes made with it run at 5fps on my maxed-out 2012 iMac. It
might _scale_ better, but Unity beats it handsdown in most low and medium
complexity workloads.

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.

~~~
stonith
I've been developing a game using UE4 on a 2012 iMac for the past year and I
get about 60fps@1080p in the editor on the highest settings. I can comfortably
run DS+2 Clients to test multiplayer when I scale it down to Low. The only
really slow thing is DebugDraw calls, which I haven't found to be a blocking
issue, though it it certainly annoying.

------
DonHopkins
By "desktop" do they mean "not mobile", or "not web" for that matter? Unity's
support for mobile (and to a lesser extent for WebGL) is certainly one of its
major selling points.

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.

------
6stringmerc
Wait, so I'm going to see more invitations from friends to games that I have
no intention of playing than I already do? I mean, I figure that's kind of
part of the business model by now. Some days I miss fragging newbies in Half-
Life DM, but when seeing stuff like this, I'm glad I freed up my time to do
stuff like mowing the yard and scooping kitty litter, which, strange as it
might sound, are on par to me now with achieving victory in an online game.

------
runevault
To me the question is will people be willing to use it? I feel like a lot of
people I know are trying to disengage from FB as much as they can while
keeping in touch with people. The older generation are not the ones who are
going to buy a ton of games through FB and the younger gen seems mostly happy
with Steam. Personally I do not see a market for this. We're not talking about
web based games like back in the Farmville days.

------
hkmurakami
Nice move from Unity, which has built a great development suite but is
hampered by its own success with its very reasonable fixed cost license per
seat business model. This partnership allows them to get a revenue cut of its
customers' games without alienating them.

I had always expected Unity to build their own steam-like platform, but this
short circuits things with an immediate huge userbase. Great move.

------
jheriko
i miss being able to install a game without having to install a bunch of
associated crap with it.

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

------
wlesieutre
Are they going to have two separate game stores/platforms? Oculus store for VR
and a separate one for everything else?

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.

------
golergka
Will they have the same sales though? After buying Ryse for $3 and filling my
game library for 300+ titles on a very limited budget, I don't think about
switching to any other game store.

------
zuckclue
Unity is a good engine but I've been playing around with libGDX lately, got a
first person XP walking around a cube now with a page of code. Easy, I'm not a
game dev.

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.

------
tosh
Wouldn't be surprised if the Facebook app (& Messenger) will be used to
distribute & host these games. Skipping the app stores.

------
touristtam
Android client for Steam is a long time coming. (and no, not just a chat
client, but a dedicated one to distribute Android games)

------
Awkwardio
I can't see this winning over PC gamers. They'll probably stick with Steam.
Casual gamers will give it a shot though.

------
aphextron
Ugh. Steam is sluggish enough as it is, being implemented entirely in C++/QT.
I cant even imagine how awful this would be.

~~~
freeone3000
Steam is basically an app that browses a website, and also downloads some
stuff. It feels like a clunky web browser because it is.

------
jakozaur
If Facebook is serious about gaming it may just acquire GoG and integrate it
with it's service.

------
131hn
Seems like an electron/nwjs app, does it sounds plausible ?

------
jcoffland
They will have to do something once everyone stops using them as a social
network. Like when MySpace became a music site.

~~~
duaneb
> They will have to do something once everyone stops using them as a social
> network.

Do you really see this happening any time soon?

~~~
ChrisClark
Years ago I used to think they would be replaced like everyone before them.
But they've reached such a large mass of people, I'm not so sure anymore. It
has to happen eventually, but I can't even guess when that would be anymore.

------
rythmshifter
kill it with fire!

------
jonathanyc
Messenger and Facebook are the two buggiest apps I use most often. For about a
week now, the "seen" indicators have been completely broken on all platforms
for me and for some of my friends. Before that, somehow my messages got pinned
to the top half of the screen for a day, which would be neat as a feature
except (1) how is that bug even possible in a sane system (2) its not a
feature.

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.

