Blizzard partners with Facebook for logins, live gameplay streaming

[Jos]

Blizzard’s Overwatch is enormously popular right now and Facebook is hoping the game’s success will help position its Live streaming platform as a legitimate contender to Twitch or YouTube. Today, the social media giant announced a partnership with the gaming studio to integrate Facebook Live into many of its games on PC.

As part of the agreement, beginning later this month, gamers will have the option of logging into World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, StarCraft 2, Diablo 3, and Overwatch with their Facebook accounts. Aside from making logging in to Blizzard games easier for PC players who also use Facebook, the company says the new login option will “pave the way for new social functionality in Blizzard games.”

Also in the works is integrating Facebook’s Live API in order to create its own ‘Go Live’ streaming functionality for its games. Players will be able to easily stream their gameplay live to their Facebook timeline, allowing friends to watch and chat with them while they are at it, or subscribe to be notified when new live streams from friends are up.

Gio Hunt, Blizzard's executive vice president of corporate operations, said the company is working closely with Facebook on this integration for Overwatch and other games.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/65116-blizzard-partners-facebook-logins-live-gameplay-streaming.html

 

[oldikes]

Because lets face it, we all want our facebook friends to know how toxic and annoying we are in our online gaming lives.

 

[alabama man]

Not blizzard too. Hope I wont get banned for getting third party software to remove facebook ads. Well if I will it won't matter as at that point blizzard is already dead to me.

 

[davislane1]

Because lets face it, we all want our facebook friends to know how toxic and annoying we are in our online gaming lives.

I was toxic IRL before being toxic in IRL was cool. This included ditching Facebook with the public statement that it was a playground for narcissists.

 

[Mister_K]

Not blizzard too. Hope I wont get banned for getting third party software to remove facebook ads. Well if I will it won't matter as at that point blizzard is already dead to me.

What are you on about? Who said there will be ads in the game by Facebook? It's a login process and streaming. Sure ads might be on the Facebook side while streaming but that's quite irrelevant to the gamer, no?

 

[Yynxs]

https://www.techspot.com/news/65009-facebook-now-tracking-non-users-showing-them-ads.html

What could go wrong?

Little Markie is trying to make Google look good so that when people complain about Google spying they can say, "But at least it's not Facebook!"

 

[Coodu]

I can't see this being a massive issue - I mean it would be nice if it was Twitch or YouTube, or an option to use both, but I see this as being similar to the way you could add Facebook friends through integration a while back.

 

[Yynxs]

I can't see this being a massive issue - I mean it would be nice if it was Twitch or YouTube, or an option to use both, but I see this as being similar to the way you could add Facebook friends through integration a while back.

I agree with you. Recently, on a Tuesday, I went to look at realm uptime status. The link is on the battle.net page. The link didn't work. A check of my firewall found the link went to Google (all of which I have blocked). In short, Blizzard battle.net was giving its status on a Google web page. I eventually found realm status on battle.net but it was several clicks in. I can't even being to express the stupidity of a company off-loading advertising revenues to another company. If Facebook is going to be doing the same, look for internal profits at Blizzard to drop and some web page programmers and their superiors to be receiving 'free' vacations and cash awards.