Back in the Farmville days, gaming on Facebook was all the rage, with incessant notifications pouring into the inboxes of social media giants asking them to harvest or join a game of Words With Friends. . Now Facebook is looking to recapture this golden age of browser gaming with a new acquisition: PlayGiga, a cloud gaming startup. This could help Facebook break into the increasingly competitive space currently occupied by Google Stadia, Nvidia GeForce Now, and the upcoming Microsoft Project xCloud. Facebook has yet to officially announce its intentions for PlayGiga, but financial publication Cinco Días suggests that PlayGiga may have been acquired for €70 million (around €78 million).
We are delighted to welcome @PlayGigaOficial to the Facebook Gaming team. We will continue to decline for the time being. Dec 18, 2019
AAA social networking games?
PlayGiga has already offered a cloud gaming service in the Middle East and Europe, and its statement after the news indicates at least a continuation of its cloud gaming effort. He said: "We continue our work on cloud gaming, now with a new mission." Although Facebook made waves among the core gaming community with its purchase of the Oculus VR, Facebook's last concerted effort into the browser-based gaming space was the launch of Instant Games in 2016. It offered its titles on similar principles to what it now we expect from cloud gaming services, which require no downloads or access to games on all devices. But these were limited to HTML5 games. PlayGiga could offer resource-intensive AAA titles that gamers are looking for. The social network, which has had a rough few years in terms of public perception, certainly already has one of the biggest challenges facing a fledgling game company already covered: users. Its network tools, privacy considerations aside, are second to none, and you can easily imagine a cloud gaming system that leverages your friends list and allows you to start a session instantly with a group of friends. Via Engadget