Originally called Facebook Games Arcade, Facebook has announced the name change and the rerelease of its new gaming platform, Gameroom.
According to the developers, along with the name change, Gameroom was announced during at Unity's game development platform conference. The platform is currently at its beta stage for both users and developers to utilize it, making it only compatible to Windows 7 and above. This will allow developers of the known Unity engine to export games into the platform as well.
Facebook itself described its new gaming platform as "ensuring an exclusive and immersive gaming experience." Gameroom also boasts of better performance when it comes to "app launch timings and memory consumption," where its games that develop "natively" in Facebook "natively takes less time." Facebook also describes that "it's easier compared to HTML5 and gives better solutions around threading, debugging, networking and memory management."
There also have been games that have been developed on Apple's MAC; however, the Gameroom client is only available for Microsoft Windows - hopefully, for now.
Facebook's Technical Program Manager Sheree Lee mentions, "Today we're announcing that Facebook support for Unity is now available in the Gameroom developer beta, and that Facebook support will ship as part of Unity 5.6 early next year."
"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," continued the program manager. "The Facebook build target lets you deploy your projects to either the new Gameroom desktop app for Windows as a native Windows player, or to Facebook.com using Unity's WebGL support."
Gameroom may be the answer to the decreasing market of browser games just like how mobile games are rising in market as well. While Facebook is planning to "earn up to 30 percent revenue cut on payments in games," TechCrunch reports that games exported to the Gameroom platform are actually modest in memory size, reaching only to 200 MB (with some actually can exceed to 500 MB in some cases).
Additionally, Facebook also hopes to allow in-game purchases for the Gameroom platform with possibly using in-game currency.
