Facebook is making its free cloud gaming service for desktop and Android available to 98% of mainland US and partners with Ubisoft: Android Us Ubisoftshahengadget

Android Us Ubisoftshahengadget: Facebook is making its free cloud gaming service for desktop and Android available to 98% of mainland US and partners with Ubisoft

Social media giant wants to become a platform for gamers, artists, and developers.

Facebook has announced that its free cloud gaming service is now available for desktop computers in the United States as well as for Android mobile devices. The program allows players to access their games on any device that has Internet access and installs a Facebook app. “We want to be a platform for gamers, artists, and developers,” said David Marcus, Facebook’s VP of Messaging Products. “Part of that is bringing gaming to people’s mobile devices,” he added.

“We’ve always heard from people that they want to play games on their phones, on the go. And so we want to make it easy for them to do that,” said Marcus. Some of the games supported include “Solitaire Blitz” by Zynga and “Candy Crush Saga” by King Digital Entertainment. The service is live for smartphone users in the United States and works on Android 2.2 or later, iPhone or iPad running iOS 5 or later, or Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.1 . Facebook will roll out the service to other countries “in the coming months,” according to a spokesperson.

Geoff Blaber, vice president of operations at game company Playbuzz, said that while many games become free to play after an initial purchase period, there are some that are free always — with extremely limited features. “This is a very significant move,” he said.

The company offers other tools for developers and creators to connect with a large audience, such as the social networking service Groups on Facebook. It also produces video ads for games, and it recently launched “Parse,” its own cloud platform that provides developers with higher performance for their apps. To make it available to games, Marcus said Facebook partnered in writing new code that allows the gaming service to run on desktop machines. “We worked with them to make it so the games will run on any device,” he said.

In-game ads are a key part of revenue for gaming companies, with 60 percent of revenue generated from them in 2012. Facebook’s service allows developers to sell virtual goods, launch special events, and even coordinate in-game purchases for its games. “In general, gamers are more engaged when they can post their thoughts and opinions” on social networks like Facebook, said Blaber. “Not just to play a game, but to make a deeper connection with their social network.”

Facebook’s service launched in 2010 and can run on the Linux operating system, for which Facebook introduced a new free tool called “Bigtop.” The Bigtop toolkit is an open-source platform that can be used by developers to create mobile apps that work across mobile device operating systems. It includes basic tools from Facebook like messaging code as well as more advanced coding tools to support cloud computing and HTML5 for portable applications, according to the company.