Mountain View, California — Google Inc., owner of the world’s most populated search engine, wasted little time bringing browser games to their fast-growing social media networking site “Google+” on Thursday unleashed a move into casual games with such titles as hugely popular Angry Birds and Zynga Poker, putting it squarely on a collision course with the social-networking giant Facebook.
Beginning today, the company will rolling out a gaming service on Google+, similar to what Facebook has been doing for years. Accordingly, the Google+ move is undercutting its rival on the slice of money taken from game developers, upping the ante in the ongoing battle for social status.
Google+, the social networking service that was unveiled at the end of June, will begin offering a wide selection of games from publishers including Zynga, Rovio and Wooga, but moments later Google announced the offering on its Official Blog, it went missing. It is likely to return very soon though. “Games will be gradually rolling out so you might not see it right away,” a Google rep says.
In the blog entry, Vic Gundotra, senior vice president of engineering for Google, emphasized that the games, when they do eventually go live, would not be appearing in everyone’s stream, an apparent veiled punch at Facebook, which lets game updates appear in its Top News and Most Recent streams. The initial developers also include Wooga GmbH, Funzio Inc. and Kabam Inc.
“With the Google+ project, we want to deliver the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to the web,” said Gundotra. “But sharing is about more than just conversations. The experiences we have together are just as important to our relationships. We want to make playing games online just as fun, and just as meaningful, as playing in real life.”
“That means giving you control over when you see games, how you play them and with whom you participate your experiences,” Gundotra wrote on Thursday.
All game-related updates will fall under an independent Games tab at the top of your feed. This is great news if you hate constant Farmville and Mafia Wars requests.
“Games in Google+ are there when you want them and gone when you do not.” Similarly, your scores will only be displayed to people in one of your circles when they themselves are interested in playing games too. “If you are not interested in games, it is easy to ignore them,” Gundotra writes. “Your stream will remain focused on conversations with the people you care about.”
Additionally, the blog entry displays 16 game titles including Zynga Poker, Edgeworld, Angry Birds, Sudoku, City of Wonder and many more. Google Engineering Director David Glazer mentioned that “they have specifically launched with a low number of associates in order to work out all of the flaws with the APIs and get end-user feedback before expanding to include more partners and games.”
That is a way to lure developers to consider Google+ first, says Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter. “And somebody will. There is a lot of guys who have a lot of trouble getting noticed on Facebook.”
“Google is certainly going after Facebook,” Pachter says. “The trick is, is there anything Google+ is doing that Facebook can not exploit? … If a game shows up on Google+ and gets any traction, then immediately that person can go over to Facebook and say, ‘Promote my game.’”
Google has a billion users globally that could be drawn into the California-based Internet giant’s social network noose. While Google+ may be the fastest-growing social network ever, it remains to be seen whether it can pose a serious threat to the social media networking titan Facebook, which has more than 750 million members.
Evidently, Games are among the most admired activities at Facebook, where social game startup Zynga rose to stardom. Now, you will find that Zynga is offering games on Google+ as well.
Nevertheless, most Google+ users — 6.4 million — are in the United States, followed by India, with 3.6 million, Canada, with 1.1 million, Britain, with 1.1 million, and Germany with over 920,000, according to online tracker comScore.
Furthermore, if you do not have access to Google+ Games as yet, check out the Google-produced video below for a look at what to expect.
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