Has Unity abandoned Facebook?

Unity Engine
1

We have been trying to migrate our game to Facebook and have been running into issues left and right. WebGL builds made with the Facebook build target, WebGL target platform, and newest Facebook Unity SDK (7.13.0) do not interface with Facebook Canvas correctly, making Unity’s Facebook WebGL builds unusable. This issue has apparently been known since at least July but is unresolved: Log into Facebook

We’ve noticed that, although Unity claims that Unity IAP supports Facebook, the IAP Catalog GUI does not list Facebook in the “Store ID Overrides”.

Lastly, Facebook is not listed as a platform on this forum: https://forum.unity.com/categories/platforms.77/

Has Unity abandoned Facebook support?

2

I’m surprised people are still interested in making games for Facebook specifically.

1 Like
3

We didn’t make the game “specifically” for Facebook, but are trying to make Facebook one of our release platforms, because every platform is more potential players and more potential revenue…

4

Yes, but the acquisition costs of players on Facebook, along with porting costs, make it something that’s… not the greatest avenue to explore. It’s very easy to actually lose money if you target too many platforms.

2 Likes
5

This is Unity; in theory our porting costs shouldn’t be much more than “switch build target, wrap a few mobile features in #if !UNITY_WEBGL, and deploy.” We’d already be done if not for SDK bugs.

Anyway, thoughts on whether Facebook is a profitable platform aren’t really relevant to the original question, which is whether Unity still actively supports Facebook or has pushed it under the rug.

6

Can I vote for “Push Facebook under a rug… and then set the rug on fire?”

Apologies. Facebook hate over. I now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.

3 Likes
7

I wouldn’t necessarily assume that this is solely the fault of Unity. I just checked the official repository - which is hosted not by Unity but by Facebook - and it’s at least one version out of date. I’m inclined to suggest that this isn’t simply a matter of Unity abandoning them but of both companies no longer being interested.

That said it could also be a situation of both companies waiting on the release of Unity for Small Things. Because as it currently stands WebGL projects are not lightweight and a very large portion of Facebook users are using their phones which means very tight bandwidth limits.

https://unity.com/solutions/unity-for-small-things
https://www.statista.com/statistics/377808/distribution-of-facebook-users-by-device/

8

Hello! Answering your question: for sure we do support Facebook platform. I’m sorry that you faced the issue with 7.13.0. We are currently checking what’s wrong with FB.Init() in 7.13.0. I will post updates here as soon as possible.

1 Like
9

So basically, in some cases, one of the dlls is stripped from the build, because it’s not used directly, to fix that issue you (or Facebook as well) have to add link.xml file with the next content:

<assembly fullname="Facebook.Unity.Canvas" ignoreIfMissing="1">
<type fullname="Facebook.Unity.Canvas.*" preserve="all"/>
</assembly>
</linker>

We still working on the fix together with Facebook, I will keep you updated.

10

Where do we place the link.xml file? Are you still working together on the fix with Facebook?

Also, the latest version of the Facebook SDK for Unity is 7.15.1, but Unity’s built-in Facebook build target only supports 7.13.0.

4566148--424579--Facebook SDK Version.png

11
  1. Anywhere under Assets in your project (see https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/IL2CPP-BytecodeStripping.html)
  2. probably
  3. This is also something for FB to update on their end.
12

How would Facebook update the version of their SDK built into Unity? That seems like something that would be handled on your end.

13

We just get the supported SDKs from their servers, otherwise we’d have to do a Unity update each time they make an SDK update which we wanted to avoid.

14

Can you get in touch with them to update the SDK? It is frustrating that the built-in version is so out of date.

15

This page says that we can use a custom Facebook SDK, but if we add 7.15.1 we get build errors when trying to build for the Facebook build target:

Plugin 'Facebook.Unity.Canvas.dll' is used from several locations:
Packages/com.unity.facebook.gameroom.sdk/Runtime/Facebook.Unity.Canvas.dll would be copied to <PluginPath>/Facebook.Unity.Canvas.dll

Assets/FacebookSDK/Plugins/Canvas/Facebook.Unity.Canvas.dll would be copied to <PluginPath>/Facebook.Unity.Canvas.dll

Please fix plugin settings and try again.

If we try to remove the older (7.13.0) Facebook Gameroom SDK from the package manager, it goes through the removal process but immediately reinstalls the package.

16

Unity tech support let me know that they are, in fact, dropping support for Facebook. See also Facebook Gameroom platform Deprecation?

17

They are dropping support for Facebook Gameroom, not Facebook entirely (which will still exists through the SDK).

18

They call it “Gameroom”, but as far as I can tell it also affects Facebook WebGL (since Unity IAP on FB runs through the “Gameroom” SDK from plugin manager)