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What Google+ Games Needs To Beat Facebook
donniebaseball23 writes "Google's new games offering on Google+ has only been around a few weeks, and it's been getting mixed reactions. According to veteran game designer Ed Del Castillo, the potential is there to beat Facebook at its own game, if Google improves in the right areas, which he outlines as evolved content, player discovery and a push for HTML5. 'Overall, the quality of Google+ gaming isn't bad. It's just another Facebook with fewer games and fewer friends. It's a baby step in a time where successful companies, like Apple, are taking huge strides. The good news is that they didn't blow it. They have a good base to build on,' he said."
It's bene out for a few months now and nothing that interesting has come out of it. People aren't moving there from Facebook, nothing interesting is happening there (compared to Facebook), and like the article states they missed some really great opportunities. I mean, Google is pushing for HTML5 and all kinds of nice new technologies. They used to innovate. They did nothing this.
I was actually interested to see what they have for offer. I saw Angry Birds and some mention about playing with your friends, so I asked my friend to join me, thinking "oh this should be fun together". But when we actually tried to see how to make a game, the great oh-so innovative multiplayer aspect was that the more friends you invite to play the game, the more levels you unlock. So fun! Not.
I see Google+ becoming just an another niche product within Google. Just like Orkut is mostly used by Brazilians. Google+ caters to the technical people and if you have those kind of friends or want to interact with them in some other way than the IRC, email, IM, forums and newsgroups, sure (though I'm not so sure that group wants to move on from the established places). There are technical people and some artful people, but that's pretty much it. It's a niche, and it's a niche that already mostly uses other mediums like forums, slashdot and newsgroups.
Google actually worked with those developers to make those games to Google+. No one else can sign up as develop yet. I would say Google played their role in it.
The circles won't do much if Google+ doesn't offer anything new or can't get people to move. Gaining popularity for new social networks is extremely hard because of the established user bases. Circles alone won't cut it. Besides, Facebook added those features too. Google+ succeeded in one thing - it made Facebook to improve their site a little bit.
The only complaints I've seen about the game implementation on Google+ has been game developers bitching about the fact that they're separated into their own tab and not splashed all over the main stream like on Facebook. As long as they're separated, I could care less what they do, but if they start caving into developer demands and splashing game bullshit all over the main stream they're going to lose a lot of people and they really can't afford to lose people.
Yeah, from now on pi will be equal to three in Google.
Google+ Nethack, of course! ;) ...Or a multi-player version of Nethack ?! ;D
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
more people.
Honmestly[sic], the fact that Google+ is aiming for HTML5 games is by and large the reason it'll end up getting and keeping mindshare in the long run. Flash is reliant on Adobe's good graces to get fixes et al, but putting it into the HTML standard means that the FOSS mantra "all bugs are shallow to many eyes" starts having meaning.
I agree to some extend, although the argument is a bit amusing in light of Google only supporting Flash for movies uploaded through the Google+ Web interface.
(you need all sorts of development tools to make a flash game, you need a text editor to make HTML)
Well, realistically to make a viable game you will be using fancy development tools 99% of the time targeting either platform, conceivably the same dev tool targeting both. The difference is if you're developing for Flash you don't have a choice as to who is supplying that dev tool, and Adobe is not the most responsive company in the world. More importantly, if you're trying to adapt your software to a particular platform, you're not limited to what Adobe supports well enough for your needs. Anyone can write HTML5 interpretation engines for their platform and likely everyone will for all credible platforms.
It's bene out for a few months now and nothing that interesting has come out of it. People aren't moving there from Facebook, nothing interesting is happening there (compared to Facebook), and like the article states they missed some really great opportunities.
It is interesting to see other people's perspective on this. Like many of us here, I'm a geek. I've seen more than one person I know post a countdown on Facebook with a link to their Google+ account and then, kill off their Facebook account entirely. I haven't gotten rid of my account, but I also got an e-mail from Facebook the other day reminding me I haven't logged in in more than 30 days. I did not plan that or anything, I've just been using it less and less. I've been using Google+ much more than I ever used Facebook. Partly this is because Huddles on the mobile app are an unbelievably easy way to do free group chats with people I actually want to talk to on a regular basis. My co-worker informed me via a Google+ Huddle, late last night, that she was not going to be in this morning. I have about the same number of friends on Google+ as I do on Facebook, but fewer of them are old high school classmates and more have things to say I actually care about. Oh, and being able to view public comments in my locality is an extra entertainment and occasionally even useful.
So I'd say Circles, Huddles, and Nearby are great additions that are better than Facebook. The other big advantage being the things Google+ doesn't have, namely a million notifications from games and boring people that I have to wade through.
you need all sorts of development tools to make a flash game, you need a text editor to make HTML
Actually I think nowadays you can write a Flash game using nothing more than a text editor and the Flex SDK, which is free and open source.
Dilbert RSS feed
Ok, I'm not really understanding the article, nor the comments. This being in light of the fact that -- as was already submitted here a week or so ago -- Google+ is NOT a social Network according to Google. It's an identity service.
Admittedly, I'm not sure I entirely believe that, as there's clearly some social network aspects to Google+. But it certainly is clear that, at the moment, that is not what they are promoting it as.
Thus, more games etc, seems kind of redundant. Other than for purely speculative reasons, should Google decide they want it as a social network.
Regardless, personally I have no need of an identity service. I will not ever sign up to any social network that requires me to use my real name. So Google+ is an useless product for me, regardless of what games or features it may ever have.
Which is kind of a shame, I actually was excited about Google+ being a much better tool than Facebook when I first heard about it. However, the ID thing is a deal-breaker.
Though, at least it scared Facebook into making a very small step towards fixing its many, and massive, privacy issues.
Every game I tried to play greeted me with a pop-up saying:
[Game] is requesting permission to ... View a list of people from your circles, ordered based on your interactions with them across Google
What are the implications of that (if I click the "More info" link it just gives me an email address for the developer)? Does that give the game developer a way to spam the people in my circles? Admittedly, they do provide a link to a privacy policy (which is different for each game), but if they think I'm going to read all of that to figure out what they plan to do with my list of contacts, well, they're wrong. I just ended up playing none of them.
Nobody actually cares that much about circles except for tech journalists who think dragging things to a circle is the most amazing innovation ever.
This is exactly the audience Google+ will attract--people who just want to be different and not use Facebook. Google+ traffic has already begun to drop off.