One of the biggest problems with social games on Facebook is finding the damn things. Facebook Gameroom is a standalone app that gathers them all together in one place.
Announced today during the Unity developers conference in Los Angeles, Gameroom acts as a hub for any game that’s playable on Facebook, from match three puzzlers like Candy Crush Saga to shooters like Dead Trigger 2. Players can launch games directly within the app without opening up an external browser window. Once inside they can play without worrying about their bosses finding Ninja Saga in their browser history.
Once inside a game, players can manage their permissions and notifications, save shortcuts to their favourites and even chat with other people playing, which sounds amazing but has its downsides.
Hooray for Candy Crush Jelly Saga chat spam.
I’ve been critical of Facebook’s gaming initiative in recent years, showcasing Candy Crush clones and other trite content above some of the more clever and inventive titles making a go at the platform. Hopefully Gameroom will be the sort of discovery engine that will help more worthwhile games shine.
Gameroom is currently available to download for PCs running Windows 7 or higher.
Comments
6 responses to “Facebook Stashes All Its Games In One App”
I give it a year, two years tops.
I don’t think trophies/achievements are interesting, but if some in-game functionality like those was tied to likes/comments, that’d be pretty cool.
I beat a boss, or pull off a fancy combo, I should get some real-world credit damn it.
There’s still games on facebook?
Hooray, Facebook invented Steam.
I love this so much, mainly because by never installing it I have even less chance of being bothered by facebook games.
For all the negative comments above (which I largely agree with), this still serves some purpose, adding control where little existed before. As a service similar to Steam, whats to stop people rating games, and having some sort of discovery service to bring the highest rated ones to the top, or something like that? Then having that sort of rating flow through to Facebook proper?
Then you have the people where those games are the core reason they use Facebook at all – they must entertain someone, or they wouldnt survive.
As much as facebook games can piss people off, or seem a waste of time, there are some pretty good ones tucked away, and they deserve to be ahead of the 50000 candy crush or flappy bird ripoffs that fill most other charts.
And in the screen shot they have there’s 2 suspicious titles.
Zombie race sounds an awful lot like carmagedon and dead trigger sounds a lot like dead island.