Entering Facebook's PC gaming platform: Gameroom

After much anticipation Facebook's PC gaming platform in partnership with the Unity developer toolset has been launched and its called Gameroom. There are talks that it reminds everyone of Steam from 2009, but for Facebook games.

The rules in the beginning are kept short and sweet. Games can't be any larger than 200MB, although it will "consider" hosting games up to 500MB on a case-by-case basis, according to the service. Which means any big games like Diablo 3: Ultimate Evil Edition's 58GB, is out of question.

Gameroom let users play web, ported mobile and native Gameroom games in a dedicated PC app free from any News Feed distractions. The idea is to ensure an exclusive and immersive gaming experience.

This is Facebook's way to take full advantage of the CPU and GPU native power. 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.

In terms of app launch timings and memory consumption in native games Facebook Gameroom provides much better performance. Also, developing in Facebook Gameroom natively takes less time: it's easier compared to HTML5 and gives better solutions around threading, debugging, networking and memory management.

This definitely comes after facebook lost its battle for mobile gaming to iOS and is now trying really hard to making it big into playing on PC with today’s developer launch of its Gameroom Windows desktop gaming platform.

The feature has undergone a lot of, beta tests and dev solicitation, before Facebook opened up the beta build for all developers and officially named it Gameroom. The app is openly available for users to download on Windows 7 and up.

The company's official blogpost  says "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."

You will also be able to use the Unity IAP service to handle in-app purchases on Facebook. Everything you need comes integrated with Unity out of the box — you can even upload your builds to be hosted by Facebook directly from the Unity Editor.