The Untold Truth Of Facebook Gaming

Facebook launched in 2004 and enjoyed a rapid rise to the top position as the most popular social media platform. However, while the platform today is well known for its integration with many different services, apps and plug-ins, at first it only supported features developed in house by Facebook. It wasn't until 2007 that Facebook opened the doors for third-party developers to design programs and games for the platform.

These early efforts had their fans and helped introduce Facebook users to the idea that they could play games within their Facebook feed, but it wasn't until 2009 that the platform had its first hit. Zynga's FarmVille launched in June of 2009 and had 60 million users by the end of the year. The game was averaging about a million new users each week, and showed that Facebook had the power to reach a mainstream gaming market that had been untapped by game developers. Facebook recognized this potential and partnered with Zynga to try and expand that reach in 2010.

While the most successful Facebook games were reaching large audiences in the first half of the 2010s, they were rarely taken seriously by the gaming community as a whole. These games were often seen as casual distractions with broad appeal while more serious mobile games were found on iOS or Android platforms. However, while the gaming community may not have been taking Facebook games seriously, they were already changing the landscape of gaming as a whole.

Facebook introduced and standardized many new concepts of modern gaming, such as microtransactions, achievement sharing and asynchronous multiplayer gaming. Microtransactions and achievement sharing are now major components of even the most high profile franchises, such as Call of Duty, and Facebook's hybrid social network and gaming platform pioneered these approaches. Asynchronous multiplayer, made popular by games such as Words With Friends and Scrabulous, let players compete without needing to be online at the exact same time. Modern racing games often include features like this, where friends' ghost cars are available so players can race against them.

The company retooled its approach to gaming, and in 2016 introduced Instant Games. This feature allowed gamers to play Facebook favorites such as FarmVille and Candy Crush Saga while consistently adding new content such as Atari classics like Galaga, Pac-Man and Space Invaders. While the free-to-play access to these games fueled a high level of engagement, with Engadget reporting over 20 billion game sessions played over the course of two years, a lack of premium content left Instant Games ignored by serious gamers.

The other problem that Instant Games faced, which kept it from being a standby favorite for even most casual gamers, was that Facebook never really seemed to decide where it belonged. The feature originally was a part of the main Facebook News Feed, according to Endgadget, but was soon moved over to Groups feed. It would then become a part of Facebook's integrated Messenger service, before being pushed out of that part of the platform in an effort to streamline the entire service. As it moved, it lost users, sometimes failing to ever gain them back.

With Instant Games failing to engage the audience that Facebook sought, the company began to rethink its approach to providing content to gamers though the social media platform. One of the first glimpses that the public would have of this new approach was through Facebook's attempts to try and acquire some of the streaming market away from Twitch and YouTube. This came in the form of its Facebook Gaming streaming platform, which launched in 2018.

The new streaming service began life as a tab within the main Facebook platform but was soon conceived as a standalone app as Instant Games was being scaled back. The removal of Instant Games in the summer of 2020 helped push existing users from that platform onto the Facebook Gaming app. This new feature would bring the entire Facebook gaming experience to one place. This put gameplay, achievement sharing and live streams together in an attempt to provide a more coherent experience for gamers.

The standalone Facebook Gaming app was expected to launch in the summer of 2020. Instead, the app went live in April 2020 in an attempt to capitalize on the booming gaming market that emerged as a result of the coronavirus crisis. Fidji Simo, head of the Facebook app, stated that the company "Had seen a big rise in gaming during the quarantine" and accelerated not only the release of the app but other gaming related projects.

Responses to the new app have been mixed. Major publications such as The Verge and Wired wondered what market the new app hoped to capture. The integration of serious streamers alongside casual game offerings is often seen as disjointed. The early release lacks exclusive offerings, and those could be needed to entice the gaming community to throw its support behind the platform. At this stage, the impact of Facebook Gaming remains in question.

In addition to potentially larger paychecks on Facebook Gaming, new streamers may find fewer barriers to building an audience than they would on other services. PUBG Mobile streamer Its Noob, who streams on both Twitch and Facebook Gaming, stated that his Facebook audience was much easier to build than his following on Twitch. In regards to Twitch, he said, "It's so difficult to get followers if you didn't start early."

There are many factors for this. One of these is that the Facebook community users tend to use their real identities, cultivating a healthier community, according to Business Insider. In addition, Facebook Gaming connects with communities outside of serious gaming networks, meaning that casual gamers are more likely to interact and smaller streamers. In the same article, Havelock said that it took him four years to reach 160,000 followers on Twitch. However, he was able to reach 500,000 followers on Facebook in under a year.

While Facebook Gaming has yet to make a significant challenge to Twitch or YouTube streaming viewership, the service's growth has seen impressive growth. In the first couple of months of 2020, Facebook gaming was in a distant third place in streaming hours watched, with half as many hours viewed as YouTube and only a sixth of the hours watched by Twitch users. However, the total numbers of hours watched on Facebook Gaming had quadrupled in January from their numbers in the first month of 2019.

Facebook's greatest asset is in the size of its user base. As the world's biggest social network, the platform has 2.5 monthly billion users, 700 million of which already engage in gaming content on a regular basis. If Facebook can convince those users to interact with the content it has set aside for users of Facebook Gaming, it could become a serious contender against both YouTube and Twitch.