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Zynga Investment May Herald Google Games
A post at TechCrunch claims knowledge of large investments from Google into social game company Zynga, makers of FarmVille and Mafia Wars. The amount of money involved is not small — somewhere in the $100-200 million range — and could facilitate Google's expansion into the games market. Quoting:
"The investment was made by Google itself, not Google Ventures, say our sources, and it's a highly strategic deal. Zynga will be the cornerstone of a new Google Games to launch later this year, say multiple sources. Not only will Zynga's games give Google Games a solid base of social games to build on, but it will also give Google the beginning of a true social graph as users log into Google to play the games. And I wouldn't be surprised to see PayPal being replaced with Google Checkout as the primary payment option. Zynga is supposedly PayPal's biggest single customer, and Google is always looking for ways to make Google Checkout relevant."
Personally, I'm always looking for ways to make Paypal less relevant.
The funny thing is, PayPal is mostly just relevant in the US and other western countries. Other countries have better online systems with full encyption, added security and several ways to use their system, and people happily use these to pay their phone and tv bills and everything else. You can also top up your account by buying one of the several coupons from the kiosk near you.
It's actually quite funny how US people put up with PayPal and their shitty and insecure system.
This is more likely to herald the entrance of Google into crap, very buggy flash games with unsubtle ways to get children to bug their parents to pay for very expensive pixels to put in their crap flash game.
Evil people are out to get you.