What was your plan and what proof did you have that it would work?
We needed to brand Google+ as a high-quality social network. That was well-understood to be the strategy, and it was intended as a long-term campaign. Start highbrow, dumb down harmlessly. This wouldn't be hard, because its early adopters were Googlers, who tend to be high-quality people.
What makes "social" so difficult for Google is that it's ideologically different from Search. In Search, you win if people get in and get out quickly. The less time they spend in getting through, the better you are doing. If you're a Facebook, though, you want people to spend time in your site. That's an ideological discrepancy between Google's very successful Search ideology (get the user in and out so fast the service is invisible) and what you need to do to win in Social.
You also need to generate comfort among your users, which is hard to do and can't be forced. Google+ has a lot of awesome tech in it (cf. Hangouts). It's a really neat piece of software. But people need to get into the product and get "comfortable" so they can start exploring. Early adopters explore right away. Most users want to be comfortable first. Facebook achieved "comfort" within an Ivy League college. It was just a silly thing your friends would see. It didn't start out as a general-purpose social network. Google+ lacked that luxury. It came into the social network space as a fully-fledged product and it's harder to establish social "comfort" that way. People are more comfortable with things that develop organically (cf. boiled frog).
This makes Games a critical battlefield. Games are a great way to bring people into the site, to get them comfortable, and to get them using the other goodies (e.g. Hangouts). If the games are good, they'll use your product a lot. It was also an arena in which Facebook seriously fucked up by not curating quality. Zynga damaged Facebook's reputation (and community quality, et al) in a major way. Mid-2011 was the nadir of its weakness on that issue. We needed to make that our strength by having some really awesome games. Where would we get them, though?
Google did Games, but not with the focus on quality. Again, this is success in Search hurting in Social. Google is admirably non-editorial when it comes to Search. What the web thinks is important is important. If you send someone to a crappy website (that he thought he wanted) so what? 5 seconds wasted, and then he types in a different query. It hardly ruins Google's brand that there's garbage on the Web. Google's job is just to document and facilitate, not to curate (with Search). The problem with Games is that people are looking for quality, but game quality isn't visible until someone plays it for 30 minutes. If you deliver someone a stinker, he resents you for wasting half an hour of his time. He'll associate you with the shitty Zyngarbage and never log in again. We needed to curate, but that doesn't scale, and the people in charge of game selection (while strong in general technical and project-management competence) did not know how to pick games.
So I came up with the Excellence In Games (EIG) initiative. Originally, I called it "Real Games" (a pun on Real Names). The idea was, instead of publishing dreck from mainstream publishers, who were giving us mediocre product because they didn't expect us to succeed, we court the independent developer community: the people who in 2013 are trolling Kickstarter for their 2D "retro" RPGs and German-style boardgames. We court these developers and give them a platform that does for them things they can't do for themselves, plus access to an enormous number of players. We also publish casual games, but only of high quality-- no Zynga dreck. By doing this, we create the image of being a gold standard for game quality. We keep the Google reputation-- we won't waste your time-- intact.
The engineers on the G+ Games team were huge fans of EIG and wanted to implement that instead of working with Zynga (who are apparently miserable to partner with) but the senior execs were not fans of this proposal. However, they were proven wrong. Google+ Games failed. Google did the smart thing and covered, which is why you've never heard of Google+ Games, but it's still an enormous missed opportunity.
and
"it [was] an enormous missed opportunity"
are not the same thing.
First, engineers familiar with the concept (including engineers responsible for working with Games) were unanimous in support of it. That's not proof of success in the market, but it's an indication. Engineers want to work on things they believe will succeed because it's good for their careers. No one thought Zyngarbage would improve the product.
Now, can I prove, beyond any doubt whatsoever, that this would have made G+ more successful in the market? No, I can't. You can't prove a counterfactual. However, it would have clearly helped. Excelling is never a bad thing, and Google has the resources necessary to afford excellence's short-term costs. Making Games more excellent would have both (a) made Google+ more excellent, and (b) brought people into the service who might otherwise have had no interest in joining "yet another" social network.
The Google way of doing things is to Excel First and Monetize Later. That's what they did with Search. It's what they needed to do with Social, but in Social, there's an added complexity... you actually need the people, and you need them to spend time in your product. So it's a different territory. Games are a great way to draw people into using a social network they wouldn't otherwise consider, but those Games need to be excellent enough to get repeat customers, so that people learn about all the other great things G+ offers (e.g. Hangouts).
Since Google+'s problems have been brand-related rather than technical (the technology's fine) I think it's fairly obvious that EIG was The Missed Opportunity of 2011. There may have been others, but EIG was the marlin.
Wouldn't the "real" games also want to launch on Facebook (and mobile), eliminating your edge?
The 6-month exclusivity would be a small cost (for the developer) compared to what we'd be offering, but give us just enough time to become the "go-to" site for this game, a long-standing advantage similar to the one that Facebook has in general "Social". Compound this across hundreds of high-quality games and G+ is the go-to site for games, even though those same games become available everywhere over time.
Of course, we'd also serve games that were already available in most places, like Angry Birds (a high-quality casual game, not Zyngarbage). However, we'd give the best terms to our brand-defining games that would have to start out exclusively with us.
Brand definition was going to be based on German-style board games (which could get people actually using Hangouts, for an awesome experience and a back-door demo of Hangouts) and 2D RPGs, to start. Many of these games would be new games from indie developers. Those two spaces would be place to get going, and there was no shortage of great ideas from engineers on other game spaces to explore after having success in those two.
So we were going to brand-define based on the "middle class" of games in terms of intensity: not mass-appeal casual, but not "gamer's games" with monstrous learning curves. We'd fill out to those spectra once we'd achieved brand definition.
I can't imagine any situation in which "quality" games would have been the silver bullet you're portraying here. They wouldn't have hurt (in fact they wouldn't hurt now should such an effort start even at this "late" date). There has to be more. Something like Hangouts, or maybe even the sort of Google Reader integration we've seen over the last year. (I'll stipulate that GR sucks, but it's still very popular and most of its users have been effectively forced onto G+ to some extent.)
It appears from the outside that the manager who decided not to concentrate on games made the right decision.
Well, yes. Would you rather play a German-style board game using a MS Hearts interface or in a crisp, modern one using a Google+ Hangout? The latter obviously.
It appears from the outside that the manager who decided not to concentrate on games made the right decision.
"Not to concentrate on games" might have been the right decision-- the games space isn't a strong match for Google's proven competencies, so staying out of it may have been the best call-- but once Google decided to do Games, it needed to do them right. It didn't, because the right people weren't calling the shots.
We did want to make the games unobtrusive, of course. Games were just the draw that would bring people into the network. The idea was that they'd stay and use the features for other things.
I don't see any support for this assertion. When was this decision taken? How many people were allocated to this "need" and for how long? Google has a vast services portfolio and a vast user base. Rather than spending cycles on a complicated area that is not a core competence, why not leverage the many services that people already use to drive interaction with G+? (Which is what Google has actually done, so far as I can tell from the outside.)
As far as I was concerned, Google should probably not have entered the Games space. Why? Because curating game designs is not something it's set up to do, and the relevant competencies don't seem to be in the leadership. Going in, as far as I'm concerned, was a big risk.
My opinion was, and still is, that there are two reasonable strategies:
1. Don't enter Games with G+.
2. Enter Games and do it right.
I saw going into Games in the wrong way as something that would embarrass and kill the product, just as Zynga contributed to social network fatigue in 2011. However, that didn't happen. Google+ Games failed, but its failure hasn't hurt Google+ in a measurable way.
I still believe that unacceptable risk of embarrassment was taken, but the course that events took (G+ Games fails, but doesn't damage Google+ wholesale) was one that I did not predict.
In fact we have heard of Google+ Games. This is because you never fail to mention this perceived injustice at every available opportunity.