Steam News: Valve Faces No Rivalry From Facebook's Gameroom

Various news reports have described Facebook's desktop gaming platform as a competitor to Valve's Steam, and yet there have been arguments put forward that insist otherwise. It may take a long time before Valve feels any impact from Facebook's Gameroom to its gaming ecosystem.

According to tech site Tom's Guide, Steam won't be surpassed by Gameroom in the forseeable future. They further state that it is not expected that Steam will be matched by Gameroom. Tech site Trusted Reviews states that Facebook's Gameroom will not make Valve's Steam disappear. They also argue that Steam's stronghold in the PC gaming market will not even be dented by Gameroom.

Tech site Engadget reveals that Steam has numerous games worth playing unlike Gameroom at this point. According to them, Steam has a polished and very useable interface in comparison to Gameroom's kludgy user interface. Valve's Steam has a huge library of games compared to Facebook's Gameroom. Steam will stay dominant in PC gaming while Gameroom will remain a smaller player.

Valve will still attract triple-a game titles from the biggest game publishers, something that Facebook will have a harder time doing. Big publishers do not want their top-of-the-line games being buried and unnoticed among the numerous browser-based casual games like those present on Facebook.

Steam can list triple-a games in its catalog which is not possible with Gameroom because of its limits on the size of games. Steam allows games to have any size while Gameroom limits most games to 200 mb in size which may grow up to 500 mb on a case to case basis. The 500 megabyte limit means that big publishers' games such as Diablo 3: Ultimate Evil Edition, which is 58 gigabyte in size, cannot be included in Gameroom's catalog. This means that top-of-the-line games have to be ruled out of Facebook's Gameroom.

Valve's Steam is more suited to hardcore PC gamers as Facebook's Gameroom is to casual or mobile gamers. Steam counts hardcore players among its users while Gameroom aims for more casual gamers. Gameroom has no chance of reaching Steam's dedicate users, the hardcore gamers. Steam's reach spans the breadth of general PC gaming as a whole but Gameroom is limited to casual players who want to play their favorite Facebook games outside of their browser.