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Facebook Build Target Now Available in Unity 5.6

March 31, 2017ByKevin Thai

With the official Unity 5.6 release, we have two new target platforms that are available in the Unity Editor: Facebook Gameroom and Facebook WebGL. In addition, we are rolling out more options for developers to scale and monetize their games with Web Hosting and Payments Lite. We're continuing to invest in tooling to make it easier to reach the 1.8B people on Facebook. Our partnership with Unity makes it easy for you to bring your existing Unity-built games to Facebook's audience. Through our work on Web Hosting and Payments Lite, we're giving developers more space to focus on building great games, leaving Facebook to worry about the underlying infra.

Facebook Gameroom Build

Built for gamers of all kinds, Gameroom supports PC games optimized for native performance, downloadable premium games and Web games built via HTML5, WebGL or Flash technology. With the new Gameroom target platform in Unity 5.6, you can easily build and publish your game optimized for Facebook Gameroom.

You can select to publish to Gameroom (Windows) or WebGL from the Target Platform field

Facebook WebGL Build

For WebGL developers, Facebook partnered with Unity to build an export option for the Facebook platform in the Unity editor. This allows you to target and publish WebGL builds optimized for Facebook Web. Gamers are not required to install any browser plug-ins to support WebGL, which will make it easier for them to play Facebook Web Games.

Web Hosting

Available for games built in WebGL and natively on Gameroom, games that take advantage of Web Hosting will continue to use iFrames to deliver the experience - which means you will no longer need to specify a Facebook Web Game URL to use them. Simply upload your assets, and we will take care of publishing and updating your Facebook Web Games URL internally.

Payments Lite

Payments Lite is a new way of defining and managing your game's in-app purchases. This new feature allows you to develop a payments solution that doesn't require a server, which is perfect for building games for WebGL or natively for Gameroom. Just like mobile development, you can now express your IAP using a product catalog and a simple set of client APIs - Facebook takes care of the rest for you.

To get started, get Unity 5.6 now here for existing users, and here if you’re new to Unity!