Unity’s web player is a popular choice for many developers to get their game out to the public, and Facebook’s announcement from the Unite 2013 Conference yesterday will offer developers another route to the players.
Support for the Unity web player in the Facebook Canvas has been vastly improved. As part of Facebook’s drive to improve their support for gaming, Unity will have more integration in the canvas, with more social features available as part of the code. All being well, your Facebook games will not need to ‘drop back’ to javascript to access Facebook’s functionality. There’s been a general reduction in ‘pain points’ both for the developers and users.
The new system should also create more user dwell time, with session times and day on day usage showing a 5%-10% increase during A/B testing. Â As for the volume of Unity games on Facebook, the social network is reporting some 90 million installs of the Unity web player to date during 2013.
Personally, I suspect the addition of 2D in Unity 4.3 is going to see a huge upswing in web based games using Unity. Facebook are making it easy for those games to appear on their site, which is a good thing for them, for developers, and for gamers.