Blizzard Entertainment and Facebook are teaming up to give players more ways to connect with friends and give streamers a new way to show their goods, according to a Blizzard press release. Facebook can be pretty annoying, but at least now all your friends’ political ramblings can be broken up with livestreams of Blizzard games.
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Blizzard has begun work to integrate Facebook Login and Facebook Live streaming support into the hottest shooter of the year, Overwatch.
The new feature has been christened with the rather unimaginative title of “Go Live”, and is in the process of being added to games in the Blizzard stable according to a report from The Verge. Later this month, players will be able to use their Facebook Login to access Blizzard games on PC, including Overwatch, Hearthstone, World of Warcraft, Heroes of the Storm, Diablo 3, and StarCraft 2. The company is trying to tap into the growing connection between games and social media. “We’re working closely with Facebook on this integration for Overwatch, as well as our other games”.
Blizzard’s collaboration with Facebook on Overwatch is part of a wider strategy as the social network company also experimented with livestreaming the Heroes of the Storm collegiate tournament Heroes of the Dorm, and the launch event for Overwatch last week. As an example, Blizzard is in the process of incorporating Facebook’s Live API in order to create its own “Go Live” streaming functionality for its games.
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Facebook’s global games partnerships director, Leo Olebe, is just as pleased by the relationship as the managers at Blizzard. Here are the best FPS games on PC. You can’t beat the targeting capabilities of these social platforms, and the collaboration has helped Blizzard showcase the game to an audience that included Facebook’s 1.65 billion users and Instagram’s 400 million.
