Google Talking To Game Devs About Creating Facebook Competitor | Hacker News Reader

Google Talking To Game Devs About Creating Facebook Competitor

gamasutra.com

11 pointsdrawkbox4 comments

I wonder if this has anything to do with the Disney purchase of Playdom yesterday?

If Google can court Zynga, Playdom and Playfish it is a very worthy competitor to Facebook in terms of the social gaming aspect which is the most sticky part of facebook beyond the people.

But will people trust Google with their social information after Buzz and other privacy breaches?

Best bet would be to make a gaming site first that is public. I wish Facebook would do something similar in separate private and public profiles, the latter for all the game friends you want but not having to granularly set permissions for them not to see other groups of friends. Basically a Kongregate version of Facebook.

Anyone else notice this? The article speculates about the platform, but Mark D (whom the article mentions just joined google) comments on the post.. He essentially confirms it.

Wow that is amazing. What he is saying about it as well has long been a dream. I hope WebGL can do for 3d content/games what Flash did for video when youtube hit. Easy, accessible, fast loading content:

Mark DeLoura: I think Flash will continue to be a very viable platform. The Flash toolset is pretty frickin' amazing, and there are a ton of happy Flash developers out there, and great games galore.

I would like to see higher-fidelity 3D content on the web though. It's been a dream of many people going back to VRML days. WebGL and Native Client are two solutions to this that will be integrated into the Chrome browser. At Google I/O we talked about Unity running inside of Native Client, which combines the hardware acceleration and security of Native Client with the fantastic toolset and runtime from Unity. It's peanut butter and chocolate (well, for me). :) This is a platform I'm really excited about for 3D web games.

Unity 3D!!!!

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