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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 higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Maybe they'll release a zynga poker app for android. I've been wanting that for awhile now.
[Google Search] World of Warcraft
Did you mean: World of Googlecraft?
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
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.
With Zyngas past indiscretions I am surprised that Google partnered with them.
Wow, how many experience points did they get for that!
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
I can't wait for the pointless shit games to hit the Android market.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I feel sort of out of touch I have no idea who zynga is, did they do something important at any point in time?
Yahoo!'s (and most of the other search engines) problems was, that they tried to promote most of the auxiliary services through the main site. Though Yahoo! isn't exactly loosing, they just did not get the majority of the search market, but for instance in Japan they are highly popular.. they are also the forth most visited site on the Internet, I wouldn't call that exactly loosing.
Google is doing a lot of stuff too, but most of it is standing alone (i.e. youtube) and is self-promoting.
They could clean up the start page a bit (or at least make it more customizable), but generally they are doing search + ads as primary business and the other stuff is loosely connected.
As for checkout.. well, PayPal was the first major popular global Internet payment option, but they are causing a lot of grief lately and will loose importance.
What will succeed them? My best bet is Amazon Payments, as they have attractive payment conditions (the nearest I have seen so far to micro-payments) and they have an established customer base with access to bank account data and _some_ trust of the users.
Google has no business where people regularly spend money from their account. They will have a hard time to make people set up payment account on their site, but it's not impossible.
This probably sheds some new light into Google's sudden defense of Flash blog post from June 29
http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html
Investing in a bunch of Flash games means they have to now start propping up the Flash platform instead of only touting the virtues of HTML5.
Perhaps their intent is to help them port their games to HTML 5 and showcase it. I am not personally one who plays these types of games (ever), but they certainly have huge followings. Getting these to HTML 5, then saying "Gee, I suppose you need an HTML 5 browser. Oh, IE doesn't work? You don't say!" seems to be what I'd say is Google's motivation. With their rabid followers who need to keep their farms healthy and mad cow free (or whatever it is they do), they could really push a LOT of people to HTML 5 browsers like Chrome.
today is spelling optional day.
If my Google account starts showing up in random places like my Facebook used to (back when I still had a Facebook account), and if I ever see a single Farmville style friend request show in my email, I'm dropping my gmail/whatever account and not looking back.
But Paypal is also evil.
I feel the same about this that I felt about the Iraq war and Saddam Hussein.
I wouldn't say that. Personally I do try to stay away from them wherever possible, but it's not because of the fees. Anytime you use credit or debit, the processor gets a chunk of the transaction to pay for the service. What's really nice about Paypal is that there's some choice as to who pays it. But on the flip side, there's a lot of behaviors which are obnoxious to say the least. Like freezing money in accounts for random reasons and refusing to give it back.
It would seem that "don't be evil" doesn't include not doing business with the likes of this asshole.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
That's just them pulling your private information from every source they can - they want your DNA. They say that they'll collect as much as they can in their privacy policy
This is in addition to the info they can suck out of your profiles on other sites like facebook
What a deal, the creators of Farmville and Mafia Wars, two games that would be a better fit for the early 90's.
There are some funny YouTube videos on both of those games.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odBDAcOEKuI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kNjC50BzB0&feature=channel
Tisha Hayes
Me to. Have considered this for a while. Never been comfortable with how much they know about us.
Can anybody recommend a good paid email host?
It's not going to be fun changing all my account's email addresses but could set up a redirection while still changing over. It's not as if I even use the Gmail interface, which is slow.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Could someone explain to me how Farmville is social gaming at all? Tradewars and Geopolitics were real social games from the BBS days. Farmville is just a virus which tries to infect all your friends with its pixel crap.
Google.com is very clean, especially until you move your mouse. And they have a customizable start page, it's called iGoogle. I don't use it, though.
Dilbert RSS feed
since advent of cds and industrialization of gaming, games increasingly became brutal capitalism products, purely made to make the maximum profit over them without paying much attention to the gamers' desires. all games, gaming studios either have gone the way of becoming extremely bloated, little gameplay - max visuals, max gore/extremism range, or gone the way of maximum simplicity, minimum effort way. all are done to target the general populations most exploitable characteristics to just make the box sell. rest is not that important. and the studios who were doing real games have either had to go the same way, or got bought by conglomerates and made to choose the same way.
thus some google influence may be good in this sector. we need more gameplay, more fun, entertainment in games.
Read radical news here
BaZynga!
Amazon what now? Ugh. Whoever lets me slap you awake first wins the internet. Um, in my opinion.
Zynga is a scary place full of scary code
I don't play the games, why would I take offence?
A most excellent question.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I really don't like these games would rather play pogo more fun and the games make sense. Plus I can use my tokens anywhere instead of just at one game.
http://www.thetechnologygeek.org
I have used Google Checkout to purchase things for my Android phone.. and have made some other online purchases with them.. Paypal has screwed up 2 out of the 4 times I have used them.. that's not a lot you say, but when something doesn't work from the getgo, and deals with money.. not many chances are given.. If given a choice for a purchase, I would take Checkout over Paypal because thus far their failure rate is 0. The majority of my purchases don't usually require either of them.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
How is it that nobody has mentioned that this is just the sort of thing to help launch Google Me? Google needs someone on their social network to bring people over, and as many people as like playing these social games, it won't be that hard to get people onto Google Me from using this.
So between Zynga leaving Facebook but people loving the games and people being upset with Facebook, now's the perfect time for Google to make deals to get people onto their social network.
2^3 * 31 * 647
I think Google has royally fucked up this time. WTF were they thinking handing 200 mil to a bunch of shady developers like them? Idiots.
For Google checkout and google games to be popular, google will have to do something about their customer service. With Paypal you can at least talk to a live person.
http://battlecell.com