Facebook and Unity partner to build new PC gaming platform

Fallen browser gaming giant Facebook wants back into the gaming market.

For a brief period Facebook’s casual gaming aspirations looked to be a new dawn for mass-market gaming, but the shift to mobile and an increased emphasis on casual, bite-sized gaming in the traditional market eroded the social network’s impact.

However, it has now joined forces with Unity to build what’s being seen as a Steam-like service to try and recapture a controlling slice of the market.

TechCrunch reckons that the new platform is designed to be ‘distraction-free’ and will operate outside of the usual Facebook template. As well as supporting the types of games people are accustomed to seeing on Facebook, it will also offer games ported from iOS and Android and even traditional console-like titles.

Developers will be offered a revenue split.

Unity and Facebook are joining forces to build new functionality into Unity that streamlines the process for exporting and publishing games onto Facebook,” a statement explained.

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.

Starting today, we’re selecting a limited group of developers to receive immediate access to a closed-alpha build of the new export to Facebook functionality in Unity version 5.4. New developers will be on-boarded on an ongoing basis throughout the testing period.”