Google+ Games: What It Needs to Beat Facebook

When the magical gaming tab first appeared on my Google+ bar I was excited. Dreams of a better social gaming world danced through my head. Finally, real competition was coming to social networks, and as my Economics professors in college used to say, “When companies compete, the customer wins.” Well, this customer was ready to win. I was primed to see what next-gen social gaming would be like.


All signs pointed to something auspicious. The slow roll out, “by invite only” launch, limited game content aided by the powerful precedent set in other areas of Google+ (like not allowing people to use false names) seemed to foreshadow something truly wonderful. I really thought that Google was going to show up in force, but like the scratching of a record in a Rob Reiner movie, my hopes came screeching to a halt. My Google gaming experience was nothing like the end of Sixteen Candles.


Still, I wanted to like it. I really did. I think of Google like people used to think of NASA – a gleaming beacon of energized super-geniuses that have nothing better to do than invent things to make my life better. Look, I like Facebook, it’s good for the games business overall and it’s really brought internet privacy issues front and center, which is great compared to the alternatives, but even I can come up with about a dozen things that Facebook could do way better. I just figured that all those frothing-at-the-brain types at Google would at least see the things I saw and hit that low hanging fruit. In the end, they didn’t even swing that high.

So in the spirit of helping put some lift under their wings, here’s a short list of what Google+ needs to beat Facebook at its own game.

Evolved Content

I think the number one shortcoming of Google+ is that it isn’t doing anything fundamentally different from Facebook on the gaming side. Yes, it’s a lot less annoying, and for that alone I think it could win over the vocal minority of Facebookers who are bothered by game notifications and posts. These people will love the serenity of not having their wall and notifications cluttered with the accomplishments, gifts, and invitations from friends who are playing the new, hot social game. As an additional bonus I even found that when kept in their place, these announcements actually became interesting to me again. When I’m on the gaming channel, that stream is relevant and I actually read it. Nice job, Google!

On the other hand, if you’re one of the vast hordes of Facebookers who loves to post your accomplishments, gift people, and finds this social outlet rewarding, this seemingly significant change… isn’t. Suddenly the number one feature of Google+ gaming -- the thing they really thought was going to get you to drop your 100+ friends and deal with the insanity that is closing a Facebook account -- goes >poof< and fades away.

Google came on strong in the beginning of “+”. They said that you had to use your real name and, like every neighborhood with a homeowners association, was headed down the path of ushering in a well-groomed, highly-regulated-for-your-protection, no nonsense, social network for grownups. But what we got is games that play exactly the same as Facebook. To be fair I’ve only played about a half dozen, but it was all the same.

"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."

What I’m saying is that I’d like to see Google do somethingbetter with their game content. It only seems like good business to find a way to be different from your competition. Better gifting, better inviting, better notifications, all are possible when the rules aren’t set. A lot of functionality found in the viral aspects of Facebook games is a direct result of those games using the preexisting Facebook infrastructure. Google has the opportunity here to improve on the model, just like they did with search in the first place.

There are so many ways that Google could raise the bar here that it’s tough to pick one, but for Google+ to compete with Facebook in gaming they are going to have to figure out how to differentiate their experience and make their game content and user experience better.

Improved Player Discovery

This was the biggest surprise for me. Google+ seems to understand groups, cliques, and social circles in a new and exciting way. I can make circles all day long and put people in them and then just talk to those people – genius. And the way they let me invite people, it’s like the free love of Burning Man in a social network. But when I go to the gaming tab, that all seems to end. I’m not seeing an easy way to find other people like me. Here I am, wanting to play games, (I’m in the section) and wanting to be social (I’m on a social network), but I can’t easily find other people who like and play the same games I play. When I go to a gaming convention (I mean, when my friends tell me stories about going to the gaming conventions!) I walk into the freeplay room to narrow down the games I want to play, figure which ones have openings, then settle in for a couple of hours of gaming fun with complete strangers. It’s the best part of a game con like PAX Prime.

There is a very real opportunity to do the same on Google+. Google can bring gamers together in this setting – a “gaming huddle” if you will. I would love to see really easy ways of setting up player groups alongside the game. “Playing Edgeworld? Here’s a bunch of people that are too!” And stuff like that. Think of the possibilities! It would be the next level of social networking. When I played World of Warcraft I’d go on a raid with complete strangers followed by blocking the jerks and friending the cool people. Those I friended would end up being chat companions, helpers, collaborators and fun additions to my game experience. I never met them, don’t know where they live, and yet we came together to make each other’s games better. That’s social, and that is what I’d like to see from Google+.

A Push for HTML5

Given Google’s unapologetic approach to controlling their content I would love to see them take a stand and insist that all their gaming content be HTML5. A powerful move like that would singlehandedly help harmonize internet gaming and soften the platform wars. It’s not world peace but it’s a good, solid first step. It was never a good idea to allow a private party control over a dominant content platform on the internet and I’m really happy to see HTML5 all grown-up and ready to party.

With the fall of NASA and Steve Jobs stepping down, I think many of us are looking for a tech company to believe in – someone who can be a standard bearer for better living through technology. If Google used their immense power to elevate HTML5, people would take notice. It might even restore some credibility to that “Don’t Be Evil” company motto. Right now the fight to control your content platform is in full force and billion-dollar corporations are burning most of their money fighting to become that platform. If we could make HTML5 the de facto language of the internet, everyone could go back to pouring money into better content instead.

Conclusion

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. And we can all agree that putting all the gaming stuff in its own stream is absolute genius.

The great news is that this is the ever-updated Internet, so get crackin’ you Google brainiacs. Put on your Devo hats and look boldly into the future. Know that if you break the molds and bring us better gaming and better socialization, we will follow you every step of the way.

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Source: Industrygamer

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Google questions Facebook’s handling of Google+ invitation links, Facebook hits back

There’s a lively debate going on between Google and Facebook today over the question of whether Facebook is filtering links to Google+. The question was raised in this Google+ links on Facebook video, and Vic Gundotra brought it up via his Google+ profile. But Facebook has hit back, saying it’s not blocking Google+ links and that users can see for themselves that this is the case. So who’s right?

A lot of users have reported having trouble replicating the alleged ‘filtering’ in the video. I had a go, and found that a Google+ link appeared to be shared just fine. Of course Facebook is probably refining its algorithms all the time, so something that happens on Friday might not happen on Wednesday. And with Facebook recently facing some serious link spam, it’s understandable if their algorithm’s are particularly sceptical of any type of link.

Of more interest here, perhaps, is Google’s public airing of the issue. Remember that just last week Google also went public with its thoughts on a patents battle with Microsoft and Apple. Is it unseemly for Google to be airing grievances in public, especially if those grievances are not necessarily watertight? It will be interesting to see how Google’s approach develops if it continues to get into scraps with some of its key rivals.

Source: 100GF

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Hands-on with Edgeworld and other Google+ games

Since the battle of the social game giants has begun, I decided to try out some of the games available on Google+ to see if the newcomer has an edge on incumbent Facebook.

So far, Google+ is working fine. The interface is well-organized and pretty simple. You just click on icons to initiate a game and they’re all pretty self-explanatory. When it comes to the mechanics, user interface or presentation of games, Facebook doesn’t really have any advantages over Google. And so far, Google has done a decent job of getting fun games with variety in its first batch of titles.

Facebook has many more users and a lot more games, but that imbalance will likely be corrected in time. But it will take a long time before Google can match some of Facebook’s more nuanced advantages such as a good recommendation and distribution system.

Google is in the process of rolling out Google+ games to its estimated 29 million users now. With Google+, you get to the games by clicking on a game icon at the top of the Google+ page. (It will appear in the coming days for most of the network’s users). You can see a bunch of choices of games, but so far there are no ads on the landing page or the game page at all – just a lot of white space. Eventually, Google will make use of that white space; otherwise, they should just set it aside for more game screen space.

The first thing that happens when you click on a Google+ game is that it asks permission to view basic information about your account, your email address, and view a list of people from your circles, ordered based on your interactions with them across Google. You can click “allow access” or say “no thanks.” If you say “no thanks,” you can’t play.

There are 16 games from 10 developers right now. Among the participants are Rovio, Electronic Arts-PopCap, Zynga, Wooga, Kabam and a bunch of other well-established players. That shows that Google will likely have no trouble attracting enough content to its game platform, as it makes sense for social game makers to diversify beyond Facebook.

I found that Angry Birds — where you send birds via slingshot at evil green piggies – was too slow to be enjoyable, when I played with the Firefox web browser. That game happens to be the only HTML5-based game, which means that it is designed to be cross-platform but may run slow in the browser. When a game runs slow, you can’t really figure out the reason why. It could be the developer’s fault, the developer’s hosting company’s fault, or Google’s fault. With the Chrome browser, the game played a lot faster. But the control was still sticky with the mouse, meaning it was hard to grab the screen a move back to a position in the scene. The game is social in that it shows you the score of a friend that you have to beat in order to be the best at a given level.

But games like Wooga’s Diamond Dash (a fun clone of Bejeweled Blitz) were quite speedy on Firefox. Graphically, the game is pretty, but it doesn’t require much movement on the screen, so it’s not that big a test of graphics capability. Diamond Dash stalled on me once, and I had to restart it. Still, I didn’t mind since it was pretty addictive. Andy Eddy, another game journalist, taunted me by saying that he beat my score in Diamond Dash.

I decided to play Edgeworld for an extended time since I was already playing the same game from Kabamon Facebook. Kevin Chou, chief executive of Kabam, said his company was working on the Google+ version of the game for about six weeks. The Facebook and the Google+ editions are pretty much identical. As you can seen from the screen shots from both Facebook and Google+, Edgeworld looks the same on either platform. The only difference for now is whether you can find a lot of your friends to play the games with.

I tried out the payment service for buying extra “Platinum” currency in Edgeworld. You can pay real money in amounts of $10 to $400 to get virtual currency that you can spend on items in the game. If you haven’t used Google Checkout before, it asks you to sign up and agree to its terms of service. For my game, it showed me only credit card payment alternatives. Over time, the number of alternatives will multiply. And in the long run, the payment system could turn out to be Google’s competitive advantage. Right now, Facebook charges a 30 percent commission on each game transaction, while Google is charging a promotional rate of just 5 percent.

On Facebook, it’s easy to find lots of friends to play games with. But on Google+, that’s going to be one of the weaknesses at the outset. Chou said that it will be interesting to create brand new games that take advantage of things such as circles, or small groups within your network of Google+ friends. You can now share something with a group, rather than everyone you know, when you’re playing a game.

At some point, it might be fun to use the video conferencing tool, Google+ Hangout, to play games where it pays off to have a lot of collaboration. So far, these games don’t really need that. Google passes the test so far. It can essentially duplicate Facebook’s platform for games and bring over a lot of games that already exist elsewhere. The next test is to see how many games it can get and how the performance works when the games scale to millions of players. Facebook may not be that worried about Google for now, but it definitely has to watch its back because its platform is not so hard to clone.

Source: VentureBeat

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Google+ games attacks the heart of Facebook’s revenues

There’s a reason why Google seems like it’s in a big rush to get games up and running on its Google+ social network. That’s because games are the way that Google will put financial pressure on Facebook.

This analysis is obvious. But there is some interesting analysis behind it from at least one analyst company. Joseph Ranzenbach, vice president of operations at PrivoCo, a New York company that analyzes financial data for private companies, had some interesting analysis of the Facebook-Google fight.

Ranzenbach, vice president of operations at PrivCo — which analyzes companies such as Facebook, Groupon, Zynga and others — says that Google+ games could badly damage a major source of revenue for Facebook. That’s because Google has offered to take only a 5 percent cut of virtual goods game transactions from third-party game makers, while Facebook is taking 30 percent. If developers sell virtual goods for a game on Facebook, they have to use Facebook Credits and Facebook gets to keep 30 percent of every transaction. That has made a number of developers angry.

Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product at Google, said that games were a key part of the Google+ strategy from the start and Google thought long and hard about how to do them. And now, just a few weeks after the launch of Google+, the game launch is already here. That means Google knows that games are critical to the success of its social network. It is interesting that Zynga, which Google invested in last year, is part of the Google+ launch. If Google can rally ore of the big players to its side, it can neutralize Facebook’s advantages in games and hurt its money-making engine.

PrivCo calculates that roughly two-thirds of Facebook’s revenues come from advertising, while the remaining third comes from Facebook Credits. So Google+ games is attacking a third of Facebook’s revenues. Of course, lots of Facebook’s ads are placed on pages where users are playing games, so a significant chunk of the ad revenue is related to games as well.

“Facebook brought this on itself by demanding such onerous terms,” said Hamadeh, chief executive at PrivCo. “This has created a lot of animosity in the app development community and Google+ is well poised to capitalize on Facebook’s overstep by offering lower pricing, looser terms, and no exclusivity.”

PrivCo concludes that the result will be a major financial impact on Facebook that could affect its planned initial public offering. That seems a little drastic, given that Facebook has outlined its own case tonight. But it’s certainly a bold prediction.

That reminds me of the motivations behind Microsoft’s entry into the video game business a decade ago. Sony launched the PlayStation 2 and said it would become the gateway to entertainment in the home and replace the PC. This scared the wits out of Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft. But Sony spoke too soon, talking about its master plan before it could execute on it. Gates saw that the bulk of Sony’s profits came from games. By attack games, Microsoft could ruin Sony’s diabolical plan to take over the world.

Microsoft had the luxury of having very profitable operating system and Office applications businesses, so it didn’t have to worry about making money as it attacked Sony’s PlayStation business.

That plan pretty much succeeded, and Microsoft now has a thriving business in games and its hardware market share exceeds Sony’s in the latest generation.

Google looks like it is taking the same game plan, directly attacking a huge profit center for Facebook. Google has huge profits coming in from search, so it doesn’t necessarily have to make a ton of money from Google+ or games yet. Isn’t this going to be a fun battle to watch? Who do you think will win?

Source: Venturebeat

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