Facebook Teams With Ubisoft on Cloud Gaming as Beta Expands to Most of the US

You may have forgotten about Facebook’s cloud gaming effort, but the service has been steadily expanding across the US, and is now available to over 98% of consumers in the continental US. 

“We’re on track to hit 100% by fall of this year,” Jason Rubin, Facebook vice president of play, wrote in the blog post. “We’re also beginning our rollout in Canada and Mexico, and will reach Western and Central Europe by early 2022.” 

The company also posted a map of its cloud gaming coverage, and it shows the service is available everywhere in the US except Montana and parts of Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. 

The beta for Facebook’s cloud gaming platform was formally announced last October, and since then it’s attracted over 1.5 million players every month. “For cloud gaming, that’s significant,” Rubin added. “The format still has a way to go, but this growth is an early signal that people are having fun and we’re on the path to delivering developer value.”

You can access the free service by going to fb.gg/play in a web browser, or by visiting the gaming section on Facebook’s Android app. (There’s no iOS access for now.) But unlike Google’s Stadia service or Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass, you won’t find any AAA video game titles. Instead, Facebook’s take on cloud gaming has focused on streaming smartphone-based games over the internet, removing the need to install them.  

Hence, the catalog will underwhelm PC gamers. But on the plus side, the service is free. “For us, cloud-streaming is a way to deliver cross-device, instant access to games, wherever people want to play,” Rubin said. The cloud gaming is also offered alongside Facebook’s collection of web-based HTML5 and Javascript games.

In the same blog post, Rubin announced that Ubisoft is joining the social network as a partner on the effort. As a result, you can now play the Android-based Assassin’s Creed Rebellion on Facebook’s cloud gaming platform.  

“We now have over 25 cloud-streamed games on the platform, with recent additions including: Roller Coaster Tycoon Touch by Atari, Lego Legacy Heroes Unboxed and Dragon Mania Legends by Gameloft, and State of Survival by FunPlus,” Rubin added. The company is also working to reduce the latency on the game streaming experience.