Breaking away from the Facebook Oculus Quest 2 news for a bit, the social media giant is stepping into a different area of the community: Cloud-based gaming. Both Google and Amazon have individual Cloud services, so what does Facebook hope to achieve? Well, the leg-up starts with its already existing space and app alongside Naughty Dog co-founder Jason Rubin leading the charge.
“We’re doing free-to-play games, we’re doing games that are latency-tolerant, at least to start,” says Jason Rubin, Facebook’s VP 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.”
Unlike Google Stadia, Rubin alleges that Facebook will be tackling many games in addition to complex titles to make their service worth it. Within the Facebook social media app, FB users can not only play the usual browser-based games that have been available for years, but also fully integrated videogames as well.
Rubin adds that this new initiative will allow for over 300 million players to jump right into the adventures they love while also having the chance to explore “more complex games as well.”
The Facebook Cloud Gaming venture will begin in the United States in certain areas before eventually spreading outwards. This service will be available both on the mobile app and on PC as well, though – not unlike other services out there – Facebook is still trying to contend with Apple to get this experience on iOS devices; a problem Microsoft especially knows well.
So what makes it different from Google Stadia?
For starters, Facebook knows this isn’t necessarily a new technology, so they aren’t going into the marketing with that approach; an approach that was one of the contributing factors to Stadia’s decline. It’s not something new, it’s something additional. Everyone and their mothers uses Facebook, this is simply an extension off of that.
Rubin went into more detail with his statement, saying: “We’re not trying to lock people in. We don’t need to because we’re not charging a fee to try these games and you’re on Facebook already. An exclusive in the classic sense — i.e. you can only play this game on the platform — probably doesn’t make sense for us.”
He adds, “What I think is going to happen, is once the platform has a large userbase, some of these developers are going to go ‘I think we should add some features that take advantage of these capabilities we never had before.’ We’ll see those games do really well on the platform, and other developers will say ‘That was an idea, we should follow along with that.’ And then somewhere along the line, some game company will say ‘We should build a game that can’t exist anywhere else.’”
It will be interesting to see how this service evolves and if it can overthrow the similar services out there. With the Oculus Quest 2’s VR release, the hardware itself is impressive but the Facebook account restrictions regarding deleted purchases and non-control over property has people even more leery of the company. To see how that awareness bleeds into the Cloud Gaming space will be intriguing.
[Source: The Verge]
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