Facebook announced yesterday that they're throwing their controller into the Cloud Gaming ring, although they seem to be doing it differently. Joining the likes of Google with Stadia, NVIDIA with GeForce NOW, Amazon with Luna and Microsoft with what was originally called xCloud (now bundled under Xbox Game Pass Ultimate).
In the blog post they go into a fair amount of detail about how it's going to work, and it seems it will be playable on Linux just like their current smaller games are as it will be directly in the browser at fb.gg/play. It's not going to split off into a new name or new service like others have done, it's just being integrated into what they're already doing with Facebook Gaming.
Facebook look to be doing it differently by coming out of the gate explaining they're not trying to over-promise, they don't want to replace existing consoles / gaming methods and just be an additional way to play games. Fair enough. They're also keeping the types of games down to a minimum to begin with, along with it only being open to the US right now in these places:
California, Texas and Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states including, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Washington, D.C., Virginia and West Virginia
With more locations through 2021 as they scale up their infrastructure to cope with more people and more games.
It's also interesting to see what types of gaming they will do, as it seems they're not going for premium purchase games like Google Stadia and no subscription like Amazon Luna. Instead, the mobile-gaming way is coming with free to play games along with "cloud playable ads" and in-app purchases.
They also announced they will add in gaming-specific Player Names and Avatars so you don't have your real name and profile picture shown up when on Facebook Gaming. Due to the way it works, it seems cross-play will only happen between Facebook Gaming and supported mobile game downloads that support Facebook's login for gaming. No cross-play with other cloud gaming or other native desktop gaming, as they seem currently firmly focused on free to play games you would find on mobile.
The question is: will you use it? All the games being free sure does bring down a big barrier.
I sure as heck won't use it though. The last thing I want to do is spend longer than 5 minutes with Facebook checking for messages from family.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Nevertheless Oct 27, 2020
tommystig21 Oct 27, 2020
Answering the question "will you use it?": no, definitely no... not this nor stadia or luna or apple arcade... I've sold my ps4 to focus on steam in my PC because i couldn't keep track of two game libraries. I prefer the simplicity of having a single store to play my games.
Quoting: KandarihuWhy did you think that we would be receptive to this?I didn't, and I don't need you to "like" or want everything that I post. What a weird way to think. A lot of what we cover is industry news, like this.
Quoting: einherjarDefinitively not. I avoid FB since years (except WhatsApp, that is hard to avoid as it would cut me off from friends etc.)If people want to contact me they can use email. Damn kids, get off my lawn!
Quoting: vskyeLast night, I read something about the United Nations having a plan for their Agenda 21 that by the year 2030, they'll have it that governments and major corporations will own everything.They already do.
But it didn't have much to do with the United Nations, which is a talking shop that does little but, with a couple of important exceptions (eg Libya) does on average more good than harm. Theories that the United Nations is going to impose some big bad thing on us all fundamentally misunderstand the nature of both the United Nations and international political economy. The United Nations has a tiny budget that depends on voluntary national contributions, no taxation powers, indeed very few powers of any kind. The only powers of coercion available to the United Nations depend on all the permanent members of the Security Council to agree about something. Since the US decided it couldn't live without the Cold War and started it up again, it can't get Russia or China to let them push any important coercive measures through the Security Council, and similarly there's no way the US would fail to veto anything important Russia or China wanted, so the Security Council is for the foreseeable future effectively a dead letter for anything big.
In short, the UN is not a significant player in international politics or economics. In the sense of some sort of autonomous political force with its own separate agenda the UN doesn't even exist. It's a category error--it's like talking about what the house of Congress plans, independent of either the Democratic or Republican parties and their Congresscritters. The UN is a creature of all the national governments that fund it; it's a place where they can argue and try to influence the little departments that do research and produce reports the media talks about, so they can score points off each other when some human rights rapporteur says bad things about the other guy. Occasionally they'll also let something like the World Health Organization do a bit of the real work they're hypothetically supposed to be doing, because most sane people agree it needs to be done. That's it, that's about all the UN is. It's not a bogeyman with vast plans.
Quoting: KandarihuPerhaps. I'm just getting really rankled by all the hype that cloud gaming is getting, and like some others here, I want absolutely nothing to do with it. Last night, I read something about the United Nations having a plan for their Agenda 21 that by the year 2030, they'll have it that governments and major corporations will own everything. And the rest of us will be relegated to services or rentals. What does this mean for gaming? It means EVERYTHING will be cloud exclusive if they have their way. And the days of us having agency of our own hardware will be over. This is the kind of future that I dread, and every single positive article about cloud gaming getting bigger and better seems to be cheering on this agenda. It hurts so much to hear about it this way.This isn't something the UN can pass and Agenda 21 is fundamentally a non-binding plan, not to mention I doubt it has anything to say about video games and cloud gaming, considering it was drafted in 1992. This is probably just a case of you getting fear-mongered by conspiracy theorists. The text is freely available, so you should probably start from there to verify any such claims: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/Agenda21.pdf
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