Facebook taps Unity to build desktop gaming platform
Facebook is looking to ramp up its mobile gaming offering by partnering with Unity to build a desktop-based platform making it easier for users to launch titles.
Facebook gaming
Clearly aping industry leader Steam, Facebook wants to expand its gaming presence to offline PC users, with the offline gaming library. Facebook’s social gaming revenue has been on the decline, reaching a peak of $257m at the close of 2014 to to $197m in the most recent quarter.
The company said: “Unity and Facebook are joining forces to build new functionality into Unity that streamlines the process for exporting and publishing games onto Facebook.
“This will allow Unity developers to quickly deliver their games to the more than 650m players who enjoy playing Facebook-connected games every month - a massive and highly-engaged gaming community that enabled Facebook to pay out over $2.5bn to just web-game developers in 2015 alone.”
It is inviting developers to apply to join an alpha build of the service by 31 August. The app will work across platforms, supposedly able to run games running on iOS, Android and Unity.