Facebook officially announces Gameroom, its Steam competitor

Facebook is taking wraps off of Gameroom, its Steam competitor for Windows PC devices. It is a continuation of years of effort by Facebook to crack the PC gaming market.

Facebook has a great potential when it comes to online and multiplayer games. With over a billion monthly active users, it provides a great foundation to build upon an immersive and coherent gaming platform. It has tried separating online games from the browser in the past and bringing a native experience for users.

Now after countless hours of internal testing and multiple name changes, Facebook is finally making a beta build of its gaming platform available to users. Gameroom will allow users to play web, ported and native Gameroom games in a dedicated PC app which is free from the distractions that Facebook News Feed is capable of providing.

Although this is supposed to be an answer to Steam’s community based gaming platform, Facebook is not jumping in the Steam’s territory just yet. It plans to start small, with the maximum size of a game that can be hosted set at just 200 MB. Facebook plans to increase this limit to 500 MB in the near future. This is far from the multi-Gigabyte games currently adoring stream shelves.

Facebook is hoping to capture the attention of both casual gamers and hardcore online gamers looking for a centralized place to engage with their friends and play multiplayer games. It remains to be seen if Gameroom will be able to entice users who are already at home in other services.

Facebook’s Gameroom is currently live at www.facebook.com/gameroom and is available for users with Windows 7 and above to download.