Facebook has made an attempt into the pc gaming market, challenging distributors like Valve’s Steam client. Facebook announced its desktop app Gameroom, which brings Facebook users into a gaming experience outside of their browser. Facebook initially announced a platform for their games in August of 2016 in partnership with Unity developer toolset. Gameroom is a gaming platform designed to centralize video games as Steam does.

Valve’s Steam platform brings in hardcore gamers with 125 million active users daily. Facebook has over a billion users on their platform and therefore expect to hit a niche audience within their user base. However, Gameroom will begin hosting games up to 200MB which is not much considering the standard for most popular games range from 1GB to 50GB. Having said that, Facebook games haven’t been memory intensive with games such as Words with Friends and Farmville. Facebook has stated that they will “consider hosting games up to 500MB on a case-by-case basis.” Gamers can also discover a lot more about these popular games and even the warzone cheat codes on certain websites.

Gameroom with will have games dedicated for this platform from Facebook and other gaming developers. These devs will be able to export games made directly for the Gameroom starting next year.

This step seems to be aimed directly to casual gamers such as the user base of Candy Crush, who will open the app every once in awhile to kill time. These type of gamers don’t want to dedicate many hours to more hardcore game such as Counter-Strike or League of Legends. The choice to leave a game at anytime is a facet of casual gaming that separates them from more hardcore gaming.

A new casual gaming platform has potential as most other platforms such as Steam and Origin are more dedicated to hardcore gamers who would prefer a good gaming performance platform. The niche of casual pc gaming is somewhat void as it is left to flash style games. As more games are released, a more definitive picture will show where Gameroom stands.