Facebook unites with Unity in renewed gaming play

Facebook and gaming developer Unity have announced a partnership targeting online, 3D and VR gaming development as part of Facebook Arcade.

Unity is the platform behind hundreds of thousands of mobile gaming apps, and its partnership with Facebook is intended to broaden its horizons and assist with the development of Facebook’s brand new PC gaming platform, currently in progress. Its aim is to target Facebook’s 650 million regular gaming users.

While successful in hosting PC games on its site in the pre-smartphone era, Facebook kind of lost out on the mobile gaming trend. It does, however, integrate well with the log-in/registration process for a vast array of third party games and applications; so gamers can post how well they’re doing on Candy Crush Saga and relentlessly badger their digital friends for more lives.

This time though, Facebook is serious about getting back into gaming. The partnership with Unity will allow developers on the platform to quickly deliver Facebook-connected games. Developers who participate in the Alpha testing phase are able to be involved with an ecosystem that paid out more than $2.5 billion to web-based developers in 2015.

To go alongside its partnership with Facebook, Unity is selecting a limited number of developers to gain immediate closed-alpha access to the new integrated functionality with the social media site in its latest version of the Unity platform.

“Our mission is to give people the power to discover, play and share the games they love with the people they care about,” said Leo Olebe, Director of Global Games Partnerships at Facebook. “Unity is the world’s leading game development platform. It’s great to be working with them to help developers find new audiences for the games they pour their hearts into.”

Last month, Unity revealed the download statistics behind its games on mobile platforms and concluded that Android is, obviously, the dominant mobile gaming platform for users worldwide.