Google+ loses key partners as PopCap, Wooga pull games | Hacker News Reader

Google+ loses key partners as PopCap, Wooga pull games

gamasutra.com

80 pointsuzero50 comments

It's strange to read the comments here on Hacker News that people are glad and "relieved" that games in Google+ are gone.

Put it this way, if Google+ remains a nerdvana, then it has lost. Google wants Google+ to be a household name. Not a niche product. It may well die a slow and painful death if it doesn't gain widespread use and adoption. Either way a nerdvana or equivalent means Google+ will never have reached its potential or what it set out to be. That's a huge failure in the scheme of things. Remember, Google changed EVERYTHING to center around Google+.

Google wants to remain one of the biggest and most relevant brands in technology to EVERYONE. Not just people interested in Linus Torvalds post comments.

March at GDC 2012, Punit Soni, lead product manager for Google+ games and mobile: "Games are key to the success of Google+"

Hacker News comments can be so out of touch with what's at stake, what is reality and what they view as "great" for their own skewed opinions. Hacker News readers are meant to understand intended audiences and project goals. Not feel relieved that games are gone.

Link Quote: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/168726/Nine_months_later_...

It is fine to enjoy something while it lasts. For the rest of it, who cares. That is Google's problem. nerdvana will always be where the nerds are, not tied to some product.

Google has made G+ intentionally unattractive to most people, and has encouraged the 40-50-ish white male technology self-promoters to be the focus of the network. They could have made other choices. This isn't our problem and can't be fixed by us.

Games, as currently implemented on social networks, are a terrible and useless waste of human time. (Imagine a true social networking game. We haven't seen it yet, but it's out there somewhere. But trying to figure out how to make people come back to your app every two hours to "harvest crops" is dumb.)

>Google has made G+ intentionally unattractive to most people, and has encouraged the 40-50-ish white male technology self-promoters to be the focus of the network.

Could you explain your reasoning? I'm not sure why you believe this to be the case. Introducing games was just one sign that they wanted to attract a wider demographic.

Google limited the appeal of G+ early on when they started enforcing their real name policy. Throwing out users when you're trying to expand the user base turned out to be counterproductive. But the policy seems more misguided than intentionally unattractive.

And we see the same problem again. The number of people who care about the real-name policy is so vanishingly small that it just doesn't matter. It's the 37 Signals cat.jpg[1] issue problem.

Look at Facebook. Everyone[2] uses their real names, and it seems to have done ok.

[1] Apparently some people thought it was outrageous that 37 Signals posted that the 100 billionth (or whatever) file uploaded was called cat.jpg.

[2] I expect some pedantic comments here about how their friend's boyfriend uses a fake name to avoid an ex-gf. If you think that is important then may I suggest you are missing the point.

It is funny, cause the no pseudonym policy was brought up as the reason why Google+ is an older male technologist wasteland, and vast majority of the vanishingly small number of people who care about the no pseudonym policy are older male technologists.

Very nicely put.

Absolutely. Facebook's success with a wider demographic is clearly due the fact that allows pseudonyms.

Wat?

Why must Google try to be just like Facebook to "win" at some fictional game of who is the most popular. I am pleased that these games are gone not so that G+ remains a nerdvana, but rather because It further focuses on the things that G+ does better then Facebook. If Google wants to focus on quality gaming content then fine but lets not lie here, these are not the most intellectually stimulating experiences being removed. Its bejeweled a simple time killer of a game. If anything this should remove some of the noise that populates the game section of G+.

Without being a nerdvana, G+ could also differentiate itself from FB as the "FB for serious things". That could be a very interesting proposition imho.

Doesn't surprise me a lot.

When the games launched I went to try a few and they all demanded to know my personal information - name, birth date, etc. I was pretty offended by that and never bothered going further. I'm generally OK with targeted advertising but there is zero reason for a game to need to know my full name and birth date.

Why would a game ask for your name when G+ is already broadcasting it?

G+ probably doesn't want to broadcast your personal information to third parties.... shocking, I know.

From a legal standpoint, there absolutely is a need to know your full name and birth date. It's called the FTC Coppa rule, where it's illegal to collect and disclosing personal information of children under age 13 without their parents’ prior consent. Acclaim got dinged by that last year and as a result, some games no longer allow underage players at all.

Yet flash games get along just fine despite that law. Worse, G+ also seems to broadcast which games you play. I use Google+ for its privacy features. I too decided not to touch any of the games due to their lack of privacy guards.

I'm, obviously, not a lawyer, but how could this possibly be a game developer's problem? you have to be 13 to have a google+ account. If they were under 13, google wouldn't vouch for them.

Uh, if you don't collect any personal information, COPPA isn't an issue. So if you don't ask for name and birthdate, you have no need to ask for their birthdate. To my knowledge, playing a game requires no personal information.

...unless they plan to monetize your information, hence first requiring your concent to it...

Knowing if someone is below or above 13 is different than knowing your exact birth date. G+ should simply confirm to that game that you are over 13 rather that give your exact details

How exactly does someone check that someone is above or below a certain age online?

The utter absurdity of such checks boggles my mind.

Also noticed them when simply accessing sites which just contain information about a game, seriously, wtf? Does anyone visiting such a site ever bother to enter their actual age/birth-date?

Sounds like the result of some extremely dumb law and management not having the guts to do the right thing and ignore it.

How exactly does someone check that someone is above or below a certain age online?

If you don't want to allow < 13, you just need to make sure you ask and don't accept people who reply with < 13. It then becomes the kid's legal guardian responsibility to make sure the child doesn't use the service.

If you do want to accept it, you need to use IRL methods (phone call, credit card, etc).

"Sounds like the result of some extremely dumb law and management not having the guts to do the right thing and ignore it."

Am I reading this properly or did you suggest that Google should be above the law?

In a way Google itself has from the start been based on ignoring (certain aspects) of a dumb law: copyright.

They download/copy content from millions of sites without explicit permission.

Of course that example is more ambiguous as the definition of fair use is vague (and ever-changing), but is not all that different.

If every business followed every law in the books the economy would crawl to a halt.

The trivial way to avoid that rule is to avoid collecting and disclosing personal information from any players of your game, which seems pretty easy.

LPA's don't require a name.

Checking through 8ish games only one asked for my date of birth. The rest of them asked for my email, public profile id, and the people in my circles (generally to generate leaderboard with friends). Seems pretty reasonable though.

Well, that's one bullet dodged. I think the last thing anyone wants to see on G+ is games. I recall the Facebook UX being significantly (negatively) affected by the addition of so-called "apps".

It is one of the first things that Google+ launched in August of last year. It may be why they built their network in the first place. Page views, signups and monetization on Facebook are heavily correlated to people playing games on the platform.

I think Google did it more for the users than for themselves. They thought people like games like Farmville and such, and it's a big reason why they spend so much time on Facebook. This is also why they left full control to the user so he can't get spammed by the games, like you get on Facebook.

Funny how now that the social network games fad is moving on Google looks even more pathetic: they blatantly, blindly went after every success FB had and didn't even get to ride the wave.

G+ has attracted a different audience than FB so I'm not surprised that games aren't catching on.

Couldn't agree more. I go to g+ for comments from people like Torvalds, Crockford, etc. I actually wasn't even aware that there are games on g+.

although i'm not a fan of facebook or g+, the idea that games are a key factor to their success is an alien idea to me.

>* the idea that games are a key factor to their success is an alien idea to me*

Games are an extra reason for people to visit the site regularly, perhaps many times per day. That increases the users exposure to your advertising and creates more opportunity for them to add some information to your database (people are more likely to post an arbitrary thought if they are already logged in to check on their farm than if they'd have to open a new browser window specifically to do so) which both helps you target your advertising and (if you are lucky enough to have people who care about what you say) may provide more reason for other people to visit regularly.

No games on Google+? Colour me relieved - and this is coming from a game designer!

I'm relieved about games not being on Google + too.

But I also know that's not what Google wants. Google wants the herd. They don't want to be 2nd (or 3rd). And if you want the "herd" you cater to the herd.

Yep, so far Google+ hasn't reach its eternal september yet, and that's a darn good thing IMO.

Not that good when Google declares it a failure and lets it stagnate like Orkut.

I'm happy with my Linux desktop, though Linux desktop penetration stagnated for the last decade. I'm not sure I have that much to gain from being mainstream.

I'm disappointed by this, but I have a feeling that Google is going to make a big gaming play. My money is on a 'game center' type app for Android at IO and that this will have some sort of tie in with Google+.

On a different note, I think that Google is basically implementing games perfectly on Google+. The reason people hate games on Facebook (and consequently, without thinking, want them gone on Google+) is because Facebook is constantly pestering you to "play Foo Game 2000 with such and such a friend", or "such and such a friend go 10000 points in Foo Game 2000". I've never once seen this on Google+. Gaming on Google+ is completely separate from its other functions (which are in turn just ways to tie Google's multitude of services together).

Google+ does social gaming perfectly, and if there's a tie in with Android gaming I think it could really take off. Imagine games that save your progress between the browser and your phone, and allow you to do all the social things that OpenFeint tries to do (but fails at).

There are games on Google+?

They did the right then and kept them hidden in the corner. I guess that did mean no one saw them at all.

Given that Zynga was the biggest reason for Facebook growth second to nothing other than the Facebook itself, I can see how this could hurt the numbers.

Then again, we all remember Farmville. We can live without that on G+.

While I am not a big fan of games, I don't mind G+ putting games on it's network to cater to the current internet generation.

Just keep that crap out of my news feed (cough Facebook cough) and all is well.

I don't give two craps that you opened a fortune cookie and now you want me to open one.

Facebook will be a thing of the past. I logged in after a long time and the UI is still cluttered with game requests, fortune cookie requests, kiss requests all other garbage I am not fond of.

Yes I can ignore these apps, but I'd rather not waste my life click ignoring on each of these stupid apps. G+ has a good signal to noise ratio on content I SUBSCRIBE to and that is why I let them use my data.

One big reason I don't like FB is, it is having games. Even though I don't play games on FB, but my friends do. And every day I see lots of notification saying, your friend is playing that awesome game, score of your friend is xxx can you beat that, your friend needs your help for abc game.

I wished g+ don't have such craps at all.

Not gonna brag, but this was very easy to see coming. Here's a blog post I wrote last year:

http://coryliu.com/post/8637665056/google-plus-sucks-for-soc...

I've heard from multiple sources that online social gaming is tapering off as a market, to be overtaken by mobile gaming apps.

Perhaps G+ was skating where the puck was, instead of where the puck should be?

Meh, life goes on. It was only a matter of time, Google+ just hasn't caught on with the masses and I don't think that it ever will. The only people that use Google+ are Robert Scoble and well I'd hardly call that a successful website if Robert Scoble is your only user, hahaha.

I can tell you I don't use G+ to play games.

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