Nearly a year ago last summer when exclusive releases were a concern for Google on Stadia at the time, the tech conglomerate established a unique release for its platform, Crayta. The game builder title was introduced at the time via its Stadia Pro subscription as the game was archived with a handful of other releases to those subscribed. However, the game was later found shipping elsewhere following.
This past February, developer Unit 2 Games announced that Crayta will then be shipping in March for the Epic Games Store – effectively breaking its exclusive ties to Stadia at the time. While exclusive for what appears to be a six-month period, Crayta is now expected to hit more platforms as time progresses.
But in a new announcement this past Friday, it is revealed that developer Unit 2 Games is now an official Facebook Gaming studio according to the social media giant. Likely, Crayta’s next release is to arrive to Facebook Gaming now.
Unit 2 Games was formed with the vision of democratizing game creation, thanks to Crayta — a collaborative and accessible platform that they’ve built from the ground up. The team has also helped establish new gaming creators while building communities around their content. Facebook Gaming shares these goals, and today we’re honored to welcome Unit 2 Games to the team.
We currently have two types of creators on Facebook Gaming: video creators who livestream games and professional game developers who make games on our platform. With the addition of Unit 2 Games, we’ll expand the notion of a Facebook creator to include people who collaboratively build, publish and share games, worlds and new experiences on Facebook.
We can now make content creation easier than ever by bringing our team together with Unit 2 Games’ team and technology. In the future, people on Facebook will create experiences in a matter of minutes without the need to code, while more advanced creators can make content limited only by their imagination. And we’re building these experiences by investing in and growing diverse engineering and product teams distributed internationally.
Vivek Sharma, Facebook Gaming Vice President
Unit 2 Games Founder & CEO Richard Smithies had this to say on the acquisition: “As many of you know, our vision for Unit 2 Games and Crayta was to truly democratise game creation, empowering more people than ever before to make, play and share games, regardless of experience or background. This has been a long-held vision for most of our team and we’ve always believed in the importance of putting powerful creative expression into the hands of as many people as possible.
“The Facebook Gaming team also shares those values and are every bit as excited as we are about the potential of this vision , and the talent and passion of our team. Joining forces allows us to unlock new opportunities and realise that potential to its very fullest. We can’t wait to see where we can take things together.”
Smithies continues, “But while we look towards a future of possibility, it’s also a time to reflect. We wouldn’t be here now without you, our earliest community. Your passion and loyalty from the moment we launched in July 2020 has blown us away. As the world struggled through a pandemic, you inspired us with the ways you used Crayta to come together to collaborate and share fun, unique and entertaining experiences. We’ve been honoured that you’ve chosen to spend time in our universe and we look forward to bringing you with us into the next stage too.”
Most likely the purchase for Unit 2 Games is to further fuel the growing Facebook Gaming platform. Already, Facebook launched its cloud streaming game service with a selection of games at the time. But, the free-to-play project accumulated more titles for its library later on, of course. Now the Cryata team will further fuel the fires. You can read the full report by heading here.
Are you surprised by the announcement from Facebook?
Source: Facebook Gaming, Unit 2 Games
