Facebook introduced Gameroom - service for gamers

Today, the social network Facebook has presented to the public its new Gameroom service, whose target audience are gamers.

The social network has long and persistently engaged in the fragmentation of content and spreading it to different angles. If earlier “more” was synonymous with “better”, now Zukenberg’s company shows us that it has a completely different policy.
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Facebook has its own popular photo service Instagram, also the company previously rendered correspondence on mobile devices into a separate Facebook Messenger application. Now it’s time for mobile gaming, and the Gameroom has appeared to the world.

However, it is worth making a few reservations at once: Gameroom physically cannot be a rival to Steam and has little in common with it. The service from the social network are exclusively games that were previously available in Facebook.

That is, now we have a separate application for casual office games and other "fun farms."

In fact, the Gameroom is a crutch that allows you to access games hosted on a social network without launching a browser and accessing Facebook.

Grigory bobuk Bakunov in his Telegram-blog so appreciated the actions of the company:

Why no one asks the question "why?". After all, it is obvious that games on Facebook and so beautifully lived in browsers.

We used to live. And now, Flash in browsers is dying, installing the Unity Web plugin for the user is too complicated, and this process is not obvious. And as a matter of fact, Facebook just released a browser, in which the main plug-ins needed for games are pre-installed. This will allow games that target the web and facebook to survive these dark times. In fact, the web assembly and the new platform for games (in the face of html5 and so on) are not yet ready, so FB and you have to get out how they can.

The market of games in social networks was "killed" by mobile developers in the area of ​​2009-2010. Then casual players massively left social networks for mobile devices and are not going to return from there.

The release of the Gameroom is a Facebook attempt to reclaim this super-profitable market. The gaming experience on the PC has always been more comfortable than on mobile devices, and the size of the casual games audience is more than wide.

But the feeling that you are in the browser does not leave for a second.



Games are pre-filtered by categories and selections, such as "strategies" or "board":



During the game, for example, in mahjong, the Facebook Gameroom process in the system consumes almost no memory (the author has 50 MB regardless of what is happening on the screen), which is more than modest compared to today's voracious browsers.

In addition, when launching any game from Gameroom, the player receives a notification that the application is not allowed to publish on its page. Apparently, Facebook understands that spamming in the form of “I have reached the N level!” With reference to the game is completely undignified in 2016.

It would seem that Gameroom gives casual players a real opportunity to enjoy simple projects behind the screen of their PC, but there are several big BUT.

Gameroom is a desktop application that requires its own installation. And there is a serious suspicion that the security policy of most organizations does not allow workers to arbitrarily install anything on their computers. Using the Gameroom at home is doubtful, since many truly profitable projects with the draconian Donat system have long ago migrated to mobile devices and tablets, and in PC environments they often have web versions that are accessible using a browser. Therefore, who, where and how will use Gameroom - an open question.

The only thing that captivates in the new desktop application from Facebook is the simplicity and an extensive library of games, available for one-click launch. The release of the Gameroom on mobile platforms does not make sense, since, in fact, it will be, rather, another “shop”, specialized on games, than a playground. And users do not need a store, as there are already appStore and Google Play.

While the application is available for download and installation only on the Windows family of systems (7 and above).