You don’t like to get bored, do you, Facebook?
A relatively short time after it decided to go after YouTube as the online video king, Facebook has decided to take on entering another battleground: Video game digital distribution.
TechCrunch broke the news that Facebook is building its own Steam-style desktop gaming platform with Unity. While there’s been nothing concrete from Facebook and they haven’t explicitly talked about competing with Steam, or other distributors like GOG or Green Man Gaming, the suggestion that Facebook could be competing with Steam can be seen in the style and presentation of its desktop gaming application, not to mention how the platform is being set up.
I remember with some perverse fondness the endless stream of Farmville and Cityville requests I used to get back when Facebook was king of the mountain of social games, prior to social games migrating to smartphones. Facebook social games earned $257 million in payment taxes in Q4 2014 but that’s slipped to $197 million last quarter, according to TechCrunch.
Since its official release in 2003 as a form of DRM for Half-Life 2 (remember when Valve made games?) Steam has become the dominant digital game distribution platform on PC with 125 million registered accounts. Steam’s active user base is just as colossal; as of my writing this there are 11 million people logged in at 11:30 AM and 900,000 people are playing Defense of the Ancients 2, one of the most popular games on the service.
Facebook, on the other hand, has 650 million users who play games each month out of its billion users. It’s paid out over $8 billion to game developers since 2010, and $2.5 billion in 2015 alone. The devil is always in the details, but the assumption that Facebook will complete with Steam has merit when you look at what we know already.
- It will run on different types of PCs, not just Windows like the Games Arcade test (as Steam does, running on Windows, iOS and Linux)
- The desktop platform provides a distraction-free gaming environment uncluttered by other Facebook features like the News Feed (Steam has an optional overlay)
- It will support the traditional casual Facebook games, mobile games ported from iOS and Android, and Unity says it will likely support more “immersive” hardcore games like you typically see on Steam or consoles, as there’s no plans for a limit on genres or specs right now (more on this in a minute)
- It will offer discoverability so gamers can find titles to play (a major feature of Steam)
- Facebook will provide a revenue split for game publishers, though it’s unclear if it will deviate from the industry standard 30% it’s used in the past (just as Steam does)
What’s interesting is that Facebook already has a fairly established hold on casual games, which could give it a niche to approach a standalone gaming client in a similar fashion to GOG.com. GOG, originally called Good Old Games, found its niche by securing distribution agreements for old games, retrofitting them to run on modern operating systems and selling them 100% DRM-free. While not quite as massive as Steam, GOG has been successful enough to launch an (optional) desktop gaming client called GOG Galaxy and it maintains a loyal (and still growing) following, myself included.
Facebook could just as easily follow a similar path by building out its focus on casual games before introducing more hardcore games down the road. It would be a much wiser approach to competing with a heavily entrenched competitor like Steam rather than just trying to beat Steam just by being Steam. Facebook itself should know this after Google attempted to make Google+ the social networking king by doing little more than being Facebook with costly results.
The major difference between GOG and Facebook, though, is their respective niches, and this is where my skepticism towards Facebook’s gaming desktop app comes into play.
GOG was able to cultivate a major following by investing in video games that weren’t commercially available and, in many cases, could only be obtained through Internet piracy. What’s more, these games appealed to the type of hardcore gamers who had been playing games most of their lives and would actively seek out the more obscure games in the GOG catalog. It was essentially a built-in audience, and I count myself in that audience. I certainly remember rushing to sign up for a GOG account the moment I saw FreeSpace 2 in the GOG library.
Facebook, on the other hand, is going to build a desktop gaming app for the type of casual games are already publicly available through legitimate commercial channels and games which people predominantly play on their phones. Even with Facebook’s massive built-in audience, my question is how many casual smartphone game players will want to use a dedicated desktop app for casual games.
Maybe Facebook could appeal to what you might refer to as the “hardcore” casual game players; people who play Candy Crush for hours at a time or who spend hundreds of dollars in Clash of Clans, but Facebook is going to have to justify the Facebook gaming platform to people who are predominantly used to playing the standalone apps on their smartphones and tablets. A significant amount of casual gaming has migrated to smartphones, and one could argue that Facebook trying to reclaim it is fighting against the curve and that using a dedicated gaming platform may be the wrong approach for a casual market.
Facebook’s presumed eventual foray into hardcore gaming presents another set of challenges: Convincing people using Steam, GOG, or other platforms. When approaching more avid gamers, you have to take their libraries into account. The average Steam user has 10 games, which is likely skewed downward; hardcore gamers (again, I include myself in this) have far more. Facebook is going to have to convince people why they should buy, say, Grand Theft Auto VI on Facebook as opposed to Steam when most of their friends who game will already likely be on Steam and probably have the game pre-ordered through Steam.
I’ve written before about how Facebook’s gargantuan size is no guarantee to its apps becoming a success, especially when you consider how Facebook’s Slingshot failed to make a dent in SnapChat’s dominance of ephemeral messaging. The trick is often whether or not the additional service being offered by Facebook compliments how and why people use Facebook or whether or not they’re doing it just to react to an existing service.
While this certainly feels like a way for Facebook to break into an area of the Internet that it lacks decisive control over, the gaming client may very well prove to compliment Facebook in a way that social games on the desktop platform once did.
I can’t really make any good faith predictions about how well Facebook will do with this based on how little we know, but I actually hope Facebook can make this work. Steam has been resting on its laurels for a while, comfortable as king of the mountain even as competing services like GOG thrive. Anything that helps disrupt the market and shake things up can be a good thing. Still, Facebook will have an uphill battle even with its vast resources. Good luck competing with Steam, Facebook; you’re going to need it.