Meta announced today that it’s bringing Roblox-like Crayta, a game development platform that lets you build and play games with your friends in real-time, to Facebook Gaming’s cloud streaming service. The company says Crayta provides an easy-to-use developer toolkit and makes game creation more accessible, whether you’re building on mobile or desktop.
The company acquired Unit 2 Games, which is the studio behind Crayta, in June 2021. Financial terms of the deal weren’t revealed, but the entire Unit 2 Games team came on as part of the acquisition. Crayta originally launched as an exclusive for Google Stadia, but rolled out to the Epic Games Store last year.
“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,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video about the launch.
By making Crayta available on Facebook Gaming’s cloud streaming service, users don’t need to download the game to their computer in order to play it. The free-to-play game development platform will be available to anyone with a Facebook account.
Image Credits: Meta
“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.
Crayta’s platform can be used to create and publish a simple multiplayer game in as little as 15 minutes, without the need to code or use other specialized skills, the company notes. The platform allows up 20 people to collaborate on games simultaneously.
The launch of Crayta on Facebook Gaming represents Meta’s continued investment toward the metaverse. Although a true “metaverse” may not yet exist, the buzzword is being used by Zuckerberg and Meta a lot over the past year and even fueled its recent corporate branding change. Earlier this year, Meta released financials for its Reality Labs division for the first time and revealed that it lost more than $10 billion last year. The company said it expects the losses will only get bigger this year, which indicates that Meta has seemingly endless money to spend on building out the metaverse and likely has quite a bit of time to pull it off ahead of other smaller companies.
As part of today’s announcement, Zuckerberg also revealed that Facebook Gaming is expanding the availability of its catalog of cloud games to Western Europe. Meta says that this is an important step for the company to take, noting that this same infrastructure will be instrumental in delivering metaverse experiences across Meta’s platforms in the future.
