Facebook has acquired Spanish cloud gaming company PlayGiga, which operates a game streaming service in Spain and Italy. The deal is worth almost 80 million USD and marks Facebook’s entry into the growing game streaming market.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the acquisition last Wednesday to CNBC. Spanish newspaper Cinco Dias first reported on the deal and speculated price last week. When CNBC spoke to Facebook about the deal, the spokesperson said “We’re thrilled to welcome PlayGiga to the Facebook Gaming team”. PlayGiga itself confirmed the takeover by saying “We are excited to announce that the PlayGiga team is moving on to something new. We are continuing our work in cloud gaming, now with a new mission.”.

About PlayGiga

PlayGiga is a cloud gaming platform provider that offers game streaming infrastructure to other companies. The company has been providing its streaming platform since 2013, mainly in Argentina, Spain, and Italy. One of their customers, Italian telco giant Telecom Italia, has been using PlayGiga to provide a game streaming service to its customers in Italy since 2017.

PlayGiga has partnered with many publishers, including Disney, Sega, WB, and Square Enix, to build a catalog of roughly 300 games that can be streamed through their platform. That includes triple-A titles like Mad Max and the Batman Arkham series.

Facebook Gaming

Facebook has been investing heavily in gaming over the years. Their most prominent moves in that field have undoubtedly been the acquisition of Oculus as well as launching their Twitch competitor, Facebook Gaming. And now it looks like they are moving into the cloud gaming space, like so many others. Google Stadia, Microsoft’s Xbox Game Streaming service (in beta now), NVIDIA’s GeForce Now (in beta forever), Sony’s PlaystationNow, EA working on Project Atlas, Amazon rumored to work on their own service as well… and now Facebook. I think it’s safe to say that cloud gaming has come to stay.

Also read: Google’s Stadia has developers excited

What are your thoughts? Do you think Facebook can succeed with its own cloud gaming service? Let us know in the comments below.