GDC 2018: Introducing Facebook's New Games SDK for PC Game Development

More than 800 million gamers play a Facebook connected game each month, and our Games SDK is the engine that helps to power this massive community across every gaming surface from mobile to console to PC.

Today at GDC we're releasing a new Games SDK for PC gaming to help developers bring more players into their games earlier, for longer and more often. The SDK supports C++ as well as Unity and includes new features that are anchored in two key areas:

• Increasing community engagement by making it easier and more rewarding for players to share from the most important surface of all: a developer's game.
• Understanding and optimizing the impact of a game's community activity with app events and analytics.

Increasing Community Engagement

Livestreaming for All: Our new livestreaming API makes it easier than ever for developers to add Facebook streaming functionality to their PC games. In a matter of seconds, players can now livestream directly from the game client to a Facebook surface without any hardware or third party software required. The new livestreaming API will also be available for mobile developers in the coming weeks via our updated mobile SDK.

Livestreaming is part of our upgrade to the powerful Sharing functionality in our Games SDK. In addition to livestreaming, we'll soon add the ability for players to record great gaming moments and share videos on Facebook Pages, Groups and Profiles via a new clipping feature that we have in the works.

Rewards: Our new rewards feature enables PC developers to create a meaningful watch experience for their community and re-engagement opportunities for their game by curating and granting free, in-game rewards for viewers that tune in during livestreams on Facebook. Rewards help to increase community interaction as players watch together and offer an incentive to jump back into the games they love. Hi-Rez Studios, developer of Paladins, has been testing rewards during the Paladins Global Series and has seen increased engagement and very positive viewer feedback. Based on strong results Hi-Rez will officially launch rewards during the Paladins Premier League on March 24th. We're now making the rewards feature available for all PC game devs.

Facebook Login & Friend Finder Enhanced with Key Player Stats: Facebook Login and Friend Finder have been valuable tools to help game developers connect their communities together. We've seen some encouraging results already from recent integrations. At BlizzCon, Blizzard cited a Facebook integration called Suggested Friends as a key contributing factor to seeing players double their network of friends on Battle.net, its online gaming platform.

With Key Player Stats, a new feature in our Games SDK, PC game developers can help their community connect even more by integrating real time player stats from their games into Facebook Groups. As a topic, games make up one of the largest categories of Groups on Facebook overall. Now players can post their stats to a Group to connect and find others to play with.

Understanding & Optimizing Community Impact

App Events & Analytics: For the first time, PC developers can integrate custom App Events and leverage Facebook Analytics to better optimize and understand their game's community activity. This new feature in our Games SDK for PC game development was previously available on mobile and web. Over time, integrating App Events will provide valuable insights that developers can use to improve game mechanics and better serve their community.

Developers can sign up to get access to the new Games SDK for PC here, and read up on more details via our open documentation page.

To learn more about our updated Facebook Games SDK for PC and mobile development, join the Facebook Gaming team today at GDC SF for our annual Developer Day. We'll share more about the latest product and engineering updates and include insights and learnings from some of our developer partners.