On Monday, Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) made its official entry into the lucrative market of gaming livestreams with the launch of its Facebook Gaming app. While a late entry into the livestreaming scene, Facebook's considerable gaming engagement through its flagship social media site could help spur the use of the tech giant's new app.
Facebook Gaming is entering a market that is already dominated mainly by the likes of Amazon's (NASDAQ: AMZN) Twitch and Google's (NASDAQ: GOOGL) YouTube, the former of which is a popular game streaming platform, and the latter of which hosts many livestreams of various types, with one of the most popular being gaming streams.
Facebook already has considerable gaming engagement on its flagship social media service; 700 million of the platform's 2.5 billion users engage with gaming content monthly, including livestreams, which Facebook is capable of hosting. The engagement in terms of viewership for livestreams, however, pales in comparison to Facebook's main competitors. Where Facebook clocked 554 million hours of viewing time in early 2020, YouTube clocked 1.1 billion hours, and Twitch came in ahead of both with a whopping 3.1 billion hours.
Facebook's new app, however, appears set to tap into a subset of gaming that the market leaders have not capitalized on; mobile gaming. The Facebook Gaming app is specifically designed to be easily approachable by casual users, allowing them to stream mobile games directly from their phone without having to use specialized apps or streaming content to a computer first. Users can immediately stream their desired content straight from their phones with little setup.
"We don't want to be the background window in a Chrome tab while someone is doing their homework or doing something else," said Vivek Sharma, Vice President of Facebook's gaming division, of the benefits of a mobile app over a PC program. "With mobile, if you have the app open and you're using the app, it's in the foreground. You can't do anything else on your mobile phone, and that is extremely powerful."
The app currently lacks ads and monetization, aside from the ability to send donations to streamers, much like Twitch and YouTube. Facebook has stated that it wants to wait and see how well the app does before moving towards more monetization.