Facebook To Invade Steam’s Territory, Working On Own PC Gaming Platform

For many PC gamers, Steam is the default platform to get all their video game goodies and has been for a while now. With the PC gaming community growing at a rapid rate and the digital video game industry racking up billions, it was only a matter of time before Facebook decided that it wanted some of that tasty pie. As such, it isn’t all that surprising that the social media giant is partnering with Unity to create its own gaming platform to compete with Valve’s.

The deal with Unity Technologies is very simple. The game engine maker will help Facebook create a platform that will allow developers to create titles and place them in the platform hosted by the social network. This, in turn, will expose the titles to the large audience that Facebook already has, Fortune reports.

In a joint press release, Unity and Facebook expressed their intent for the collaboration, with Leo Olebe, the director of global games at Facebook saying that their mission was to bring relevant video games to people who might appreciate and play them.

“Unity is the world’s leading game development platform,” Olebe said. “It’s great to be working with them to help developers find new audiences for the games they pour their hearts into.”

As Tech Crunch noted, Facebook was once the biggest platform for social video games. “Farmville” and “Candy Crush” are two of the most popular titles that were immensely popular among users, thus netting the social media site $257 million back in Q4 of 2014.

Revenue has gone down since mobile gaming became more popular, however, which explains Facebook’s decision to muscle its way into Steam’s territory. If successful, this would give the social network another major victory in clinching a huge part of internet activities, securing yet more real estate in an ever shrinking cyber space.