Quick take:
- Meta has launched the game developer platform Crayta on Facebook Gaming.
- The Roblox-like gaming platform lets users build and play games with their friends in real-time.
- The company said the platform will make game creation easier on both mobile and desktop.
Meta has accelerated its metaverse push with the launch of Crayta on Facebook Gaming. The Roblox-like gaming platform allows users to build and play games with their friends in real-time. Crayta’s launch comes at the back of Meta’s acquisition of Unit 2 Games, the company behind the developer platform, in June 2021, with the entire team joining Facebook Gaming.
Crayta provides users with an easy-to-use developer kit allowing them to create games on both mobile and desktop platforms.
Commenting on the importance of integrating the platform with Facebook Gaming, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: “Historically if you wanted to have something like this run in this high quality of a 3D environment, that would be really hard to render in a browser or on phones, but being able to do it with cloud infrastructure and then send it down across the network after having already rendered it in the cloud is a pretty big advance.”
This allows users of Facebook Gaming’s cloud streaming service to play the game without downloading it to their computer.
Crayta is offered as a free-to-play game developer kit, allowing anyone with a Facebook account to access it.
“A lot of times today, people think about the metaverse as 3D experiences you can have in virtual and augmented reality, but I think what Crayta shows is that you can both build and enjoy these kind of experiences really easily on all kinds of 2D environments including just within the Facebook App on phones and on computers,” Zuckerberg said.
According to the company, users can easily create and publish a simple multi-player game within 15 minutes, regardless of coding knowledge or some special skills. It also allows teams of up to 20 people to collaborate on games simultaneously.
The launch also comes as Facebook Games expands its portfolio of cloud games into Western Europe. The company sees this as an important step in its metaverse plans because “the same infrastructure will be instrumental in delivering metaverse experiences across Meta’s platforms in the future.”
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