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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."
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.
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.