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With so many people turning to video games even though its new time stuck inside, Facebook is launching a dedicated mobile app for Facebook Gaming months ahead of schedule to try to capitalize on the recent surge in audience seen on other live streaming platforms like Twitch and YouTube.
The free app launches on Monday in the Google Play Store, The New York Times reports, and a corresponding iOS version is set to follow once “Apple approves”. While Facebook’s latest foray into the $ 160 billion gaming industry originally debuted in June, the company decided to increase its release date after noting “a huge increase in gaming during quarantine,” Fidji Simo, head of the Facebook Gaming app, he told the Times.
“Investing in games in general has become a priority for us because we see games as a form of entertainment that really connects people,” said Simo. “It is entertainment that is not just a form of passive consumption, but entertainment that is interactive and brings people together.”
Currently, you can watch and stream games through the main Facebook app, but even with Facebook 2.5 billion monthly users, still struggling to compete with the top competitors in the broadcast landscape. According to Streamlabs, Facebook Gaming is number three in total hours observed after Google’s YouTube Gaming and Amazon Twitch. It was further delayed in terms of the amount of content offered, with Facebook Gaming averaging less than 5 percent of the 121.4 million hours aired on Twitch so far this year.
Through the launch of this application, Facebook hopes to make a bigger niche for itself by focusing on the content that is often overlooked on these platforms: mobile games. It’s a smart move that takes advantage of Facebook’s large mobile audience and avoids a tug of war on prominent PCs and consoles, What is it happening between Twitch and Microsoft’s competitor Mixer.
Users will be able to stream their gaming sessions through the app simply by clicking the “Go Live” button which “allows users to upload streams of other mobile games to the same device by pressing just a few buttons,” according to the report. . Other platforms require additional third-party software to stream mobile games as they are primarily designed to support gamers on PCs, its predominant user base.
“We don’t want to be the background window in a Chrome tab while someone is doing their homework or doing something else,” Facebook vice president of games Vivek Sharma told the Times. “With the mobile device, if you have the app open and you’re using it, it’s in the foreground. You can’t do anything else on your mobile phone, and that’s extremely powerful.”
That same Facebook Gaming stream can also be streamed to the user’s personal Facebook page to engage viewers both inside and outside the app. At the moment, the company told the Times that the app will be ad-free, and that revenue will depend on commissions from an extension of its “star” system, the name of Facebook Gaming for real-world cash that Spectators can tip individual broadcasts. (in the same vein as the Twitch “bits”).
