Facebook plainly misses the days when everyone sat around playing FarmVille and Mafia Wars through its laggy blue-and-white pages, even if no one else does. Yesterday, the company gave a hint about how it plans to recapture that lost market post-Flash: A new gaming platform called Gameroom, built in Unity.
Gameroom is clearly aimed at the casual desktop market rather than the mobile or hardcore PC market with games like Cooking Mama and Texas HoldEm Poker. I gave it a spin this morning and see nothing in it that would be considered a traditional MMORPG, though there are a handful of games happy to label themselves that way for search purposes (Darkstar Legends, Guns and Magic, DivoSaga II, and other little games MMORPG players have never heard of). The RPG category is loaded with OARPGs, multiplayer fighters, and online strategy titles that sit on the outskirts of our genre (like Oz: Broken Kindgom, Game of Thrones Ascent, and Bleach Online, which we know is your favorite). In other words, even if it’s not mobile, it pretty much looks like a mobile store… or the cheapie bin on Steam.
Anyone spy anything in there worth a look for the MMORPG playerbase?
