Facebook is the latest tech giant to get into the world of cloud gaming — but the company’s offering is quite a bit different than the competition. Unlike Amazon or Google, which both offer standalone cloud gaming services for a fee, Facebook is introducing cloud games to its existing app — several of which are playable right now.
“We’re doing free-to-play games, we’re doing games that are latency-tolerant, at least to start,” says Jason Rubin, Facebook’s vice president of play. “We’re not promising 4K, 60fps, so you pay us $6.99 per month. We’re not trying to get you to buy a piece of hardware, like a controller.”
According to Rubin, the reason Facebook is exploring the cloud is because it opens up the types of games it can offer. The company started out in games more than a decade ago with Flash-based hits like FarmVille before moving to HTML5 for its Instant Games platform, but both of those technologies are relatively limited to smaller, simpler experiences.
For Facebook, one barrier to adoption of its cloud-gaming strategy could be whether its service will be allowed on Apple devices. Over the summer, Apple rejected Facebook’s submission for a stand-alone app that would have enabled people to get instant access to web-based games. Apple later approved the app after Facebook reluctantly agreed to remove the games from it.
this industry landscape is going to dramatically change this gen because tech giant are now entering market. This is most likely why Microsoft became aggressive with acquisitions because they don’t want to lose a market like they’ve done with the mobile market. It’s going to be a battle between these giants to acquire studios, so they can create for their cloud platform. At the moment Microsoft has the major lead, but they will for sure remain aggressive and have the okay from Satya to go for broke because cloud computing is Satya’s specialty.
This is precisely why Microsoft has become aggressive in their acquisitions, and they’re uniquely positioned to do so: their wealth, reach of existing franchises, and Game Pass. In a recent interview, Phil even furthered Satya’s statements by saying basically that with the speed of GamePass growth, they see a future where they’re constantly bringing more studios into the fold.
It’s also something we’ve discussed a ton on this thread:
Exciting times for Xbox and I just hope they can outplay groups like Facebook or Amazon when it comes to additional acquisitions (personally, I think Google and Facebook are the worst corporations to enter gaming).
Didn’t realist Jason Rubin (Naughty Dog founder) worked with Facebook! This is kinda interesting since FB also has that deal with MS/xCloud to let users stream Xbox games directly from FB in the future. I think most ppl forgot about that deal.
When Amazon Luma was announced I said Facebook would be next and someone here (don’t remember who) pushed back and said they’ll stick with VR. So sure, the gaming industry to changing forever and that’s all fine, but the most important thing to remember from this story is that I was right.
Yeah, I think it was on my “Buying Mode” thread and I was right there with you. For worse, Facebook was always going to enter more into the gaming market; they have a tendency to follow the other giants when they don’t initiate the trend. Microsoft knew all of this, and knew that around this time they’d be competing more with Facebook, Apple, Google, and Amazon, which is why they start making acquisitions two years ago. It’s also why Phil said what he did today with the statement that they’ll continue to invest and bring more teams into the fold.
