Brettspielwelt seems cool, but I don't think chat alone quite brings us to being "social". For all the "hardness" of German-style games (and they're actually not that "hard") they're also quite social. That, I think, is the brilliance of the best Eurogames. They're complex enough to deliver interesting play for the high-NFC crowd, but they're simple enough to still be credible social games. They're non-trivial and involve some teaching time, but they're designed to be played by families.

Google+ Hangout integration with the German games, and with the well-designed social games like Apples to Apples and Great Dalmuti, and with typical card games (Hearts, Spades, Ambition) would have been totally badass. Not only would it have made online gaming actually social, but it would have given people a reason to use Hangouts (which are cool, but never caught on because they didn't have a draw, and games could have been the draw).

What I really wanted was to engage and empower the developer community. Right now, developing a new board game is very hard. You have to print a scrappy prototype and find people willing to play it (play testers). It takes several hundred hours of testing to balance a non-trivial game. This is a major barrier to entry for game development, and in the age of cloud computing and analytics and video chat, there's no excuse for it to be that way. No reason to limit this to German-style board games either; we could have also engaged 2D "retro" gamers and eventually supported MMORPGs. We'd probably want to stay away from the forefront of graphics, but no reason we couldn't have delivered excellent game play.

But... upper management wanted to give preferential treatment to mainstream publishers, and the result is that Google+ Games flopped.