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Facebook launches Gameroom, a Steam-like platform for casual gamers

Do you prefer a game of Millionaire City over Cities: Skylines? How about a game of League of Angels – Fire Raiders while your friends play League of Legends? Well then we have good news for you, or rather, Facebook does.

The social network behemoth has released an open-beta of its own gaming platform it calls Gameroom.

The service allows gamers to play web games and games developed for the platform on their Windows PC, so long as the user is running Windows 7 and above.

Oh the game's you'll be able to play.
Oh the game’s you’ll be able to play.

The software is available for free right now and the list of available games is incredibly robust. While Facebook is now competing with the likes of Steam and its 11 million concurrent users (over the last 48 hours) its worth noting that Facebook has over 1.71 billion users. Facebook is no stranger to games, the social network was once well known for its casual, web-based games until smartphones became more prominent and users stopped making Facebook their first choice for games. Whether releasing a Windows-based platform for games will be successful remains to be seen.

A developing idea

Facebook also has an ace up its sleeve: native support for Unity.

The social giant announced that when Unity 5.6 ships early next year developers will be able to deploy games directly to Gameroom or straight to Facebook’s website. “With Facebook Gameroom, Facebook is introducing an easier way for developers to bring high-quality games to the PC to take full advantage of the CPU and GPU native power,” said Facebook.

 

Exporting games from Unity to Facebook is easy.
Exporting games from Unity to Facebook is easy.

As we mentioned the platform is still in beta so expect the app to come with a few bugs (we’ve already had the app crash on us once) but you can now finally play FarmVille 2 without being distracted by your friend Joe’s memes. You can download and install Gameroom for free now.

 

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