Meta is shutting down the standalone Facebook Gaming app

Meta has began notifying customers of its standalone Fb Gaming app that it’ll quickly now not be accessible. In an in-app notification (as shared by social media advisor Matt Navarra and different publications), the corporate has introduced that each iOS and Android variations of the applying will cease engaged on October twenty eighth. Meta can be giving customers the prospect to obtain their search knowledge and reminding them that Fb Gaming is not going away fully. Customers will merely must go to the Gaming tab in the primary Fb app to observe their favourite creators’ livestreams.

The corporate launched the devoted Gaming app in 2020 to higher compete with Twitch and YouTube. Meta (nonetheless often called Fb again then) designed the app to focus on content material from streamers and to offer customers with a bunch chat and different neighborhood options. It did not say why it determined to close down the standalone app, but it surely might be a part of its cost-cutting efforts meant to assist it climate what Mark Zuckerberg calls “one of many worst downturns [the company has seen] in current historical past.”

Over the previous 12 months, streaming instrument suppliers akin to StreamElements reported that Fb Gaming comes solely second to Twitch with regards to hours watched on a sport streaming platform. Nonetheless, we examined knowledge from CrowdTangle, Meta’s analytics service, and located that the platform is flooded with spam and pirated content material masquerading as gaming livestreams. Again then, a spokesperson instructed Engadget that Meta was “working to enhance [its] instruments to establish violating content material” in order that customers can have “the most effective expertise.”