Game-creation platform Crayta has officially launched on Facebook Gaming’s cloud-streaming service, which will allow users to play around with its world- and game-building environment for free, without the need for a gaming computer.
"With our cloud-streaming tech, it's really fast to build on both mobile and desktop even if you don't have a powerful system," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in Facebook post.
Facebook acquired Unit 2, the studio behind Crayta, in June 2021 in a bid to democratize game creation. "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," Vivek Sharma, VP of Facebook Gaming, said at the time.
The game has been available on Google Stadia and the Epic Games Store, and now it comes to Facebook Gaming, "a platform that lets you build and play games with your friends in real-time," Meta said in announcing the launch.
The Crayta environment may remind players of Roblox. As Unit 2 describes it, "the platform offers a vast array of detailed meshes and voxel materials for creators to build with, alongside scripting language Lua to add mechanics to their worlds. A large default selection of character outfits, emotes and other cosmetics allow players to customise their appearance and interactions, and are also added to quarterly with themed seasonal content."
In a video demo, Zuckerberg showed off a Crayta-fied version of Facebook's headquaters.
“A lot of times today, I think people think about the metaverse as 3D experiences that you can have in virtual and augmented reality, but 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 during the demo.
Zuckerberg is leaning heavily into this metaverse future, as his company's 2021 name might suggest. It's still early days, but Meta has seen growing interest in its Quest 2 VR headset, while its Horizon Worlds environment recently reached 300,000 users.