Meta announced that Crayta, a Roblox-like game development platform that lets you make and play games with your friends in real-time, is coming to Facebook Gaming’s cloud streaming service. According to the company, Crayta is an easy-to-use developer toolkit that makes game development more accessible on mobile or desktop.
In June 2021, the company acquired Unit 2 Games, the studio behind Crayta. The deal’s financial terms were not disclosed, however, the acquisition included the whole Unit 2 Games crew. Crayta was initially a Google Stadia exclusive, but it was released on the Epic Games Store last year.
While Crayta has some similarities to Roblox in terms of game creation, it also takes aspects from Fortnite, the most evident of which being its bright and cartoonish aesthetic. It also features rotating seasons and a battle pass, and it allows players to customise their own avatars. One of the unique features of Crayta is that it allows one to share a game with a single link, allowing the friends to play immediately from their browser.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “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.”
By making the game available on Facebook Gaming’s cloud streaming service, one does not need to download the game on their computer in order to play. Anyone with a Facebook account will be able to use the free-to-play game development platform.