Meta brings game development platform Crayta to Facebook Gaming’s cloud streaming service

techcrunch.com:

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