For years, people have been able to play games, watch gaming videos, and connect with fellow gamers on Facebook.
But what if they did more?
Imagine a world where you didn’t just watch a gaming creator stream their play session, but instead you could jump in and play with them live without needing to buy, download, or install the game — or a world where the gaming video you were watching becomes interactive itself.
Facebook has excitedly announced its first investments in Play Watch Connect: a new framework to help deliver more immersive and engaging social experiences that build community around games on Facebook. Products in the new Play Watch Connect framework will bridge those three pillars together — playing games, watching gaming video, and connecting with others around games — to create richer experiences between people on their platform.
Play with Streamer
Facebook Gaming creators are more than entertainers — they’re community builders who bring people together over a shared love of games. To do that, they engage with and build relationships with their communities. We want to build tools that help our creators do this in new and meaningful ways. To start, Facebook is amping up the ‘gameplay‘ in gameplay videos. From a button on a livestream, Play with Streamer lets viewers jump into the game and play directly with their favorite Facebook Gaming creators while the stream remains picture-in-picture so they don’t miss a beat.
Facebook Interactives
They’re also making live gaming video an active experience with the introduction of Facebook Interactives: new experiences layered on top of livestreams. In the future, these might include trivia questions, audience polls, and even playable games on-stream. The limits of these experiences stretch as far as our developers’ creativity, and won’t necessarily be limited to gaming. Whether minigames, full games, or companion apps, our hope is that Facebook Interactives will make watching live video a more immersive, social, and engaging experience for our platform’s viewers.
You can see Facebook Interactives in action in PAC-MAN COMMUNITY’s Watch mode, where viewers of a 24/7 livestream pick a side and power up the AI PAC-MAN™ or Ghosts in competition with each other. Soon, these features will unlock new community achievements, turning the PAC-MAN interactive livestreams into a global arcade in which all viewers play together to win. Facebook Gaming creators will be featured inside the interactive streams as they play, with viewers able to suggest mazes.
Other features unique to the PAC-MAN interactive livestreams will be announced in coming months.