10 ms·

Google+ Games is shutting down

97 points by jmillikin 13y ago

joyeuse6701 13y ago
I'm surprised by how many technical people are butt hurt over every subsequent shutdown of a service after Google Reader. It sucks to invest time and effort into something that was assumed to exist, however naively, forever. On the other hand, if we were to hold on to every design and implementation we've ever created without the ability to throw it away, no matter whom or what depends on it, our technological progress would probably be slowed. Could you imagine if every piece of code you wrote once it was functioning, couldn't be thrown away and you had to support it forever once it existed? That would blow. It's much like backwards compatibility decisions. Sometimes you gotta break free. Just breathe, remember it's not the end of the world, and if you're on the self entitlement band wagon, you're going nowhere fast.
- DanBC 13y ago
  Well, that's one of the major sucky features of the cloud. It's out of your control. If you want to use a typewriter you can. If you want to still use WordStar or WordPerfect you can (so long as you have hardware it'll run on). > It's much like backwards compatibility decisions. Sometimes you gotta break free. I agree that clinging onto backward compatibility feels like we've hurt progress. Especially since that compatibility was with x86.
- CyberDroiD 13y ago
  I think the correct sentiment: if you're relying on an advertising company like Google, you're going nowhere fast.
  - JoeKM 13y ago
    Relying on a eCommerce company like Amazon, you're going nowhere fast. I too can make blanket ignorant statements. Google is not just an advertisement company anymore. Haven't been for awhile.
    - frostmatthew 13y ago
      How can you possibly suggest that? For 2012 advertising revenues made up nearly 95% of Google's total revenue ($43.6B of $46B). http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html
- JoeKM 13y ago
  What annoys me is it's become a bandwagon for karma. Half the people bitching at Google for shutting some service down probably never even used the service. Companies kill unpopular or bad products. Google is not unique.
ckdarby 13y ago
Almost had a nervous break down because I thought Ingress was going to be listed >_> !
- Kiro 13y ago
  Is it fun?
  - jaredmcateer 13y ago
    Depends on your personality. If you enjoy stuff like Geocaching, it would probably be fun, but if you live in an area with a limited amount of portals or don't like travelling outside your regular area, not so much.
- kailuowang 13y ago
  I have some concerns over that too, but ingress is completely independent, which means, if they really don't see it fitting into their strategy they can either spin it off of sell it to another company, hopefully. Yes Google reader is somewhat independent too, but at least it has "Google" in its name. They can't spin it off of sell it.
  - anonymfus 13y ago
    Did Google ever sell some business?
    - kailuowang 13y ago
      I would say yes if that includes departments of companies they acquired.
      - ysangkok 13y ago
        Examples?
        13y ago
nickconfer 13y ago
In short. Google+ is thriving, but we decided to shut down Google+ Games. Look away... Look away. If you paid for anything contact the companies that are already tired of us and have them solve your problem. Oh and by the way, try our new Google Play Game Service! Hurry, before it's gone!
- nickconfer 13y ago
  Sorry for the snarky comment. I usually don't make these types of comments but shutting down a service, asking users to do the leg work to solve game credit problems, and then marketing a new service in the same post bugs me.
  - auxbuss 13y ago
    No, no. You nailed it succinctly and without bitterness. Well played!
  - JoeKM 13y ago
    I trust if Facebook did the same thing you would post the same snarky comment? (Sorry for the snarky comment)
- alec 13y ago
  The "shut it down, you lose all your stuff, and we're starting over" strategy worked for Amazon and ereaders (result: Kindle), but hasn't so much for Microsoft and music (result: Zune marketplace).
  - microtherion 13y ago
    Maybe Google could license the “Plays4Sure” name for their new game system.
  - taeric 13y ago
    When did I lose anything from Amazon?
    - 13y ago
michaelochurch 13y ago
Well, now the company that treated me like human garbage for pointing out a doomed product direction will, at least, have to view me as human garbage that was right. Progress, one day at a time. (My idea that was that we should engage independent developers and provide the resources to integrate them with Hangouts, thus having a double win because we'd both (a) get people comfortable with Hangouts and (b) have a higher quality of games than if we published Zynga dreck.)
- Mz 13y ago
  No, they don't actually have to "view you as right," even if you absolutely were. Intended as helpful: What is the point of your screed here? What do you think it will do for you? What are you trying to accomplish? People who are awful to you are highly unlikely to own up, apologize, make amends...etc.. Life rarely works that way. Not trying to make your life harder. I have done some venting myself on HN at times.
- tptacek 13y ago
  Apropos nothing: as many readers of my own comments will happily attest, it is easy to both be right and behave like "human garbage" (or whatever non-hyperbolic term you'd like to substitute for that one).
  - jmillikin 13y ago
    One important contrast with the OP is that although your posts are sometimes blunt, they are almost always cogent and well-argued.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - waterlesscloud 13y ago
      One of the most difficult (but most rewarding) tricks to learn is to separate the merit of an argument from the manner in which it is expressed.
piokoch 13y ago
That's something that makes me afraid to invest more time in learning Go language. What if after investing my time in learning Go, one day I'll see Google blog post saying: "Go lang project at Google is shutting down, we will no longer develop that. But don't worry we decided to donate that project to Apache Software Foundation! It is now called Apache Go. Look for in ASF incubator, just next to Apache Wave (formerly known as Google Wave".
- oinksoft 13y ago
  Go is not a service, it is a language and runtime with open-source implementations. If Go is worthwhile, it will survive even Google shutting down. I don't see why you would find Go under Apache to be bad news.
  - prostoalex 13y ago
    Same argument could be applied to Wave (which also featured an open-source client, server and protocol implementations), or OpenSocial (which also featured an "open" set of standards) and yet without a strong and motivated backer such projects stop feature development and fade into oblivion.
    - justinhj 13y ago
      Almost, except Wave is a specific product that didn't find an audience. Go is a general purpose language and it already has users outside of google to care for it.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      1) If Google ditched Go, it would hardly be the only open source language without a corporate backer. Languages without corporate backers cannot be said to categorically "stop feature development and fade into oblivion." 2) Nobody gave a shit about Wave or OpenSocial, even when Google was backing them...
    - Torgo 13y ago
      Wave included a bunch of bots to integrate with various services, that did not get open-sourced along with the rest of it.
unsignedint 13y ago
Now they have GPG, that's pretty much enables the same kind of functionality and better outside of Google+ Games. So it makes sense, I guess.
jensenbox 13y ago
Please send me any data regarding Google shutdowns. http://jensenbox.github.io/timeline/ http://jensenbox.github.io/timeline/
- omarali 13y ago
  http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/map_of_the_week/2013/03/google_reader_joins_graveyard_of_dead_google_products.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/map_of_the_week/201...
- mtext 13y ago
  blablabla
- BoyWizard 13y ago
  One thing that's missing from the timeline is equivalent services that Google have launched/purchased. For example, Google Video didn't so much 'shut down' as merge with (the arguably better) Youtube.
salimmadjd 13y ago
I'm shocked and surprised! How is that possible? after all this was going to be yet another amazing google product built by bunch of smart people that made it through 12 rounds of interview process. To paraphrase, "people with no imaginations hire people with no imagination" :)
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  All shutting down Google+ Games means is that the integration of web games with the Google+ UI is going away in favor of piecemeal integration. Google+ Games is essentially the old Facebook model that even Facebook-linked games are using less, the new model (supported by Google Play Game Services, Google+ SSO, the Google+ Moments API, etc.) is of games (quite often native mobile games rather than web games) that interact with a support platform through a sign-on API, cloud services that provide saves/multiplayer toos/leaderboards/acheivements, and systems that allow integration with social network news feeds.
  - tarkin2 13y ago
    This actually makes sense. The Google play services do seem to offer more. But do I trust Google's services (especially ones that are open, although I doubt this is or was the case with games) anymore? No. I trust them about as much as I trust any company's services. I just didn't think Google were any company, until recently.
kailuowang 13y ago
As a shareholder of Google, it's encouraging for me to see that Google shuts down products that didn't work out really really fast (Nexus Q and now Google+ Games).
- glomph 13y ago
  If only they shut down g+ as fast! :p
  - pacomerh 13y ago
    hehe, yeah, Google+ is working, but in a strange way
    - mindcrime 13y ago
      FWIW, I generally find that the majority of referral traffic to the Fogbeam Blog is from Reddit, with Hacker News and/or Twitter next, possibly Slashdot if we got something on there, and then G+ and "everybody else". Until a week or so ago... for the first time, I noticed some posts that we put up where we got more traffic from G+ than from Twitter. Yeah, it's just one anecdote, and there are all sorts of possible reasons, but it definitely appears that G+ has it's niche in some regards. It might not ever displace Facebook as the main 'generic' social network, but it's no tumbleweed filled wasteland like some people would lead one to believe.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  G+ Games would have worked if they had listened to the right people.
  - DanBC 13y ago
    There are plenty of fantastic ideas, worked on by smart people, at good companies, that fail. Maybe G+ Games would have been good if Google had listened to the right people, but we don't know that, eh? I know that I'm probably reading too much into some of your Google posts, but they make me sad. I hope you manage to find something (peace? comfort?) and move on. Like I say, I'm probably mis-reading your posts and maybe I'm talking nonsense.
mtgx 13y ago
Google+ Games was not successful. I don't think it's that kind of community. So it makes sense to shut it down if no one was using it. Wouldn't you agree?
- mindcrime 13y ago
  Google+ Games was not successful. I don't think it's that kind of community. So it makes sense to shut it down if no one was using it. Wouldn't you agree? Maybe yes, maybe no. I don't think any of us here in the peanut gallery have enough information to really say. I mean, we can - I suppose - take Google at their word that it wasn't "successful" but we don't know things like: 1. Why wasn't it successful? 2. How are Google defining "successful" here? 3. Are there other decisions or investments that could still be made to make it more "successful"? 4. What are the possible n-th order effects of having a Games ecosystem, even if it isn't seemingly "successful" in isolation? 4.5 - what are the n-th order effects of the shutdown notice? How will developers react to this? Does it damage trust in Google as a brand? Will there be "downstream" fallout from this? 5. What, if anything, does this say about the possibility of an "apps" (non game) ecosystem within G+? 6. Etc. Now I'm not saying Google are wrong to do this... from their perspective it may well be the right decision. Or it might not. Even companies full of very smart people don't always make good decisions on everything.
  - cthackers 13y ago
    I don't get why everybody is so whiny and bitchy about what Google does and does not. It's a public company that's in it for money and all the stuff they make and you use for free - be it good or not; costs a lot of money to maintain and host and develop and all that. It's not their responsibility to privately mail you their road map and spendings and ask your opinion about what to do with their money. I hated when they close products I'm using and I do use a lot of google stuff. But .... for the love of god people...
    - mindcrime 13y ago
      I'm really not sure why your reply is attached to my comment above. I'm not bitching about anything, just observing some random thoughts that one could apply to this sort of decision. I don't begrudge Google anything for shutting down G+ Games, as I never played the first one of them, nor was I ever likely to. It's not their responsibility to privately mail you their road map and spendings and ask your opinion about what to do with their money. I hated when they close products I'm using and I do use a lot of google stuff. But .... for the love of god people... Riiight, not sure if that was meant to be directed to my reply, or if that was happenstance, but I certainly don't claim that Google have a responsibility to mail me anything or solicit my opinion on anything. That said, it's pretty clear why people make a big deal out of these announcements: Google are so large and powerful and have such a disproportionate amount of influence over what happens on the Web these days, that everything they do impacts a lot of people and likely has ripple effects throughout the entire ecosystem. So it's hardly unreasonable for people to take notice and comment on this stuff.
dwc 13y ago
When they launched Games on G+ I was pretty excited. I went to play and was greeted with "Games are social!" along with a prompt to share all my social networking info with 3rd parties. Decline and you can't play. Games are social? I'm supposed to hear "social" and just enthusiastically agree to that? Sorry, but no. I never went back.
chintan 13y ago
I think the killer feature was ability to use "Hangout" with G+ Games. Sigh! I had a half baked card game (where seeing other peoples faces was a critical element) that I was planning to implement on G+.
- jmillikin 13y ago
  If you're willing to require your players to use modern browsers (Firefox and Chrome), and don't care about social network integration, then http://www.webrtc.org/ http://www.webrtc.org/ should be a great alternative.
  - chintan 13y ago
    aha! neat, thanks!
  - ysangkok 13y ago
    Flash has this feature for at least 10 years now. So no need to exclude. Proof: http://web.archive.org/web/20031221102318/http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/help04.html http://web.archive.org/web/20031221102318/http://www.macrome...
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > I think the killer feature was ability to use "Hangout" with G+ Games.</blockquote> Apps (games or not) can still interact with Hangouts via the Hangouts API, which is not affected by G+ Games shutting down. > Sigh! I had a half baked card game (where seeing other peoples faces was a critical element) that I was planning to implement on G+. Aside from embedding the game in the G+ Web UI, what are you missing that you would have had with G+ Games with existing G+ APIs (Hangouts, Moments) and the Google Play Game Services API? AFAICT, shutting down G+ Games just means that the Google+ UI as a portal to web games is going away.
evolve2k 13y ago
Closing Down! Everything must Go!
metaphorm 13y ago
can someone explain to me why people view service shutdown's (by Google in particular, it seems) as some kind of epic betrayal? In every other industry, discontinuing a product is a non-event. In fact, even within the software industry its usually a non-event. Nobody is out there screaming havoc when Goodyear tire discontinues a product line that wasn't selling well. Google isn't allowed to do the same?
methodin 13y ago
I forgot that games even existed on it. Did anyone use it? Seems to confirm that Facebook is indeed not their actual competitor.
nichols 13y ago
Google's new project will be robots responsible for shutting down old services and groups. Rumor has it that they'll be called "Terminators," and they'll look kind of like this: http://imposetonwallpaper.free.fr/wallpapers/films/terminator/Terminator3T800.jpg http://imposetonwallpaper.free.fr/wallpapers/films/terminato...

97 points by jmillikin 13y ago

I'm surprised by how many technical people are butt hurt over every subsequent shutdown of a service after Google Reader. It sucks to invest time and effort into something that was assumed to exist, however naively, forever. On the other hand, if we were to hold on to every design and implementation we've ever created without the ability to throw it away, no matter whom or what depends on it, our technological progress would probably be slowed. Could you imagine if every piece of code you wrote once it was functioning, couldn't be thrown away and you had to support it forever once it existed? That would blow. It's much like backwards compatibility decisions. Sometimes you gotta break free. Just breathe, remember it's not the end of the world, and if you're on the self entitlement band wagon, you're going nowhere fast.

DanBC 13y ago
Well, that's one of the major sucky features of the cloud. It's out of your control. If you want to use a typewriter you can. If you want to still use WordStar or WordPerfect you can (so long as you have hardware it'll run on). > It's much like backwards compatibility decisions. Sometimes you gotta break free. I agree that clinging onto backward compatibility feels like we've hurt progress. Especially since that compatibility was with x86.
CyberDroiD 13y ago
I think the correct sentiment: if you're relying on an advertising company like Google, you're going nowhere fast.
- JoeKM 13y ago
  Relying on a eCommerce company like Amazon, you're going nowhere fast. I too can make blanket ignorant statements. Google is not just an advertisement company anymore. Haven't been for awhile.
  - frostmatthew 13y ago
    How can you possibly suggest that? For 2012 advertising revenues made up nearly 95% of Google's total revenue ($43.6B of $46B). http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html
JoeKM 13y ago
What annoys me is it's become a bandwagon for karma. Half the people bitching at Google for shutting some service down probably never even used the service. Companies kill unpopular or bad products. Google is not unique.

ckdarby 13y ago

Almost had a nervous break down because I thought Ingress was going to be listed >_> !

Kiro 13y ago
Is it fun?
- jaredmcateer 13y ago
  Depends on your personality. If you enjoy stuff like Geocaching, it would probably be fun, but if you live in an area with a limited amount of portals or don't like travelling outside your regular area, not so much.
kailuowang 13y ago
I have some concerns over that too, but ingress is completely independent, which means, if they really don't see it fitting into their strategy they can either spin it off of sell it to another company, hopefully. Yes Google reader is somewhat independent too, but at least it has "Google" in its name. They can't spin it off of sell it.
- anonymfus 13y ago
  Did Google ever sell some business?
  - kailuowang 13y ago
    I would say yes if that includes departments of companies they acquired.
    - ysangkok 13y ago
      Examples?
      - 13y ago

nickconfer 13y ago

In short. Google+ is thriving, but we decided to shut down Google+ Games. Look away... Look away. If you paid for anything contact the companies that are already tired of us and have them solve your problem. Oh and by the way, try our new Google Play Game Service! Hurry, before it's gone!

nickconfer 13y ago
Sorry for the snarky comment. I usually don't make these types of comments but shutting down a service, asking users to do the leg work to solve game credit problems, and then marketing a new service in the same post bugs me.
- auxbuss 13y ago
  No, no. You nailed it succinctly and without bitterness. Well played!
- JoeKM 13y ago
  I trust if Facebook did the same thing you would post the same snarky comment? (Sorry for the snarky comment)
alec 13y ago
The "shut it down, you lose all your stuff, and we're starting over" strategy worked for Amazon and ereaders (result: Kindle), but hasn't so much for Microsoft and music (result: Zune marketplace).
- microtherion 13y ago
  Maybe Google could license the “Plays4Sure” name for their new game system.
- taeric 13y ago
  When did I lose anything from Amazon?
  - 13y ago

michaelochurch 13y ago

Well, now the company that treated me like human garbage for pointing out a doomed product direction will, at least, have to view me as human garbage that was right. Progress, one day at a time. (My idea that was that we should engage independent developers and provide the resources to integrate them with Hangouts, thus having a double win because we'd both (a) get people comfortable with Hangouts and (b) have a higher quality of games than if we published Zynga dreck.)

Mz 13y ago
No, they don't actually have to "view you as right," even if you absolutely were. Intended as helpful: What is the point of your screed here? What do you think it will do for you? What are you trying to accomplish? People who are awful to you are highly unlikely to own up, apologize, make amends...etc.. Life rarely works that way. Not trying to make your life harder. I have done some venting myself on HN at times.
tptacek 13y ago
Apropos nothing: as many readers of my own comments will happily attest, it is easy to both be right and behave like "human garbage" (or whatever non-hyperbolic term you'd like to substitute for that one).
- jmillikin 13y ago
  One important contrast with the OP is that although your posts are sometimes blunt, they are almost always cogent and well-argued.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - waterlesscloud 13y ago
    One of the most difficult (but most rewarding) tricks to learn is to separate the merit of an argument from the manner in which it is expressed.

piokoch 13y ago

That's something that makes me afraid to invest more time in learning Go language. What if after investing my time in learning Go, one day I'll see Google blog post saying: "Go lang project at Google is shutting down, we will no longer develop that. But don't worry we decided to donate that project to Apache Software Foundation! It is now called Apache Go. Look for in ASF incubator, just next to Apache Wave (formerly known as Google Wave".

oinksoft 13y ago
Go is not a service, it is a language and runtime with open-source implementations. If Go is worthwhile, it will survive even Google shutting down. I don't see why you would find Go under Apache to be bad news.
- prostoalex 13y ago
  Same argument could be applied to Wave (which also featured an open-source client, server and protocol implementations), or OpenSocial (which also featured an "open" set of standards) and yet without a strong and motivated backer such projects stop feature development and fade into oblivion.
  - justinhj 13y ago
    Almost, except Wave is a specific product that didn't find an audience. Go is a general purpose language and it already has users outside of google to care for it.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    1) If Google ditched Go, it would hardly be the only open source language without a corporate backer. Languages without corporate backers cannot be said to categorically "stop feature development and fade into oblivion." 2) Nobody gave a shit about Wave or OpenSocial, even when Google was backing them...
  - Torgo 13y ago
    Wave included a bunch of bots to integrate with various services, that did not get open-sourced along with the rest of it.

unsignedint 13y ago

Now they have GPG, that's pretty much enables the same kind of functionality and better outside of Google+ Games. So it makes sense, I guess.

jensenbox 13y ago

Please send me any data regarding Google shutdowns. http://jensenbox.github.io/timeline/ http://jensenbox.github.io/timeline/

omarali 13y ago
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/map_of_the_week/2013/03/google_reader_joins_graveyard_of_dead_google_products.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/map_of_the_week/201...
mtext 13y ago
blablabla
BoyWizard 13y ago
One thing that's missing from the timeline is equivalent services that Google have launched/purchased. For example, Google Video didn't so much 'shut down' as merge with (the arguably better) Youtube.

salimmadjd 13y ago

I'm shocked and surprised! How is that possible? after all this was going to be yet another amazing google product built by bunch of smart people that made it through 12 rounds of interview process. To paraphrase, "people with no imaginations hire people with no imagination" :)

dragonwriter 13y ago
All shutting down Google+ Games means is that the integration of web games with the Google+ UI is going away in favor of piecemeal integration. Google+ Games is essentially the old Facebook model that even Facebook-linked games are using less, the new model (supported by Google Play Game Services, Google+ SSO, the Google+ Moments API, etc.) is of games (quite often native mobile games rather than web games) that interact with a support platform through a sign-on API, cloud services that provide saves/multiplayer toos/leaderboards/acheivements, and systems that allow integration with social network news feeds.
- tarkin2 13y ago
  This actually makes sense. The Google play services do seem to offer more. But do I trust Google's services (especially ones that are open, although I doubt this is or was the case with games) anymore? No. I trust them about as much as I trust any company's services. I just didn't think Google were any company, until recently.

kailuowang 13y ago

As a shareholder of Google, it's encouraging for me to see that Google shuts down products that didn't work out really really fast (Nexus Q and now Google+ Games).

glomph 13y ago
If only they shut down g+ as fast! :p
- pacomerh 13y ago
  hehe, yeah, Google+ is working, but in a strange way
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    FWIW, I generally find that the majority of referral traffic to the Fogbeam Blog is from Reddit, with Hacker News and/or Twitter next, possibly Slashdot if we got something on there, and then G+ and "everybody else". Until a week or so ago... for the first time, I noticed some posts that we put up where we got more traffic from G+ than from Twitter. Yeah, it's just one anecdote, and there are all sorts of possible reasons, but it definitely appears that G+ has it's niche in some regards. It might not ever displace Facebook as the main 'generic' social network, but it's no tumbleweed filled wasteland like some people would lead one to believe.
michaelochurch 13y ago
G+ Games would have worked if they had listened to the right people.
- DanBC 13y ago
  There are plenty of fantastic ideas, worked on by smart people, at good companies, that fail. Maybe G+ Games would have been good if Google had listened to the right people, but we don't know that, eh? I know that I'm probably reading too much into some of your Google posts, but they make me sad. I hope you manage to find something (peace? comfort?) and move on. Like I say, I'm probably mis-reading your posts and maybe I'm talking nonsense.

mtgx 13y ago

Google+ Games was not successful. I don't think it's that kind of community. So it makes sense to shut it down if no one was using it. Wouldn't you agree?

mindcrime 13y ago
Google+ Games was not successful. I don't think it's that kind of community. So it makes sense to shut it down if no one was using it. Wouldn't you agree? Maybe yes, maybe no. I don't think any of us here in the peanut gallery have enough information to really say. I mean, we can - I suppose - take Google at their word that it wasn't "successful" but we don't know things like: 1. Why wasn't it successful? 2. How are Google defining "successful" here? 3. Are there other decisions or investments that could still be made to make it more "successful"? 4. What are the possible n-th order effects of having a Games ecosystem, even if it isn't seemingly "successful" in isolation? 4.5 - what are the n-th order effects of the shutdown notice? How will developers react to this? Does it damage trust in Google as a brand? Will there be "downstream" fallout from this? 5. What, if anything, does this say about the possibility of an "apps" (non game) ecosystem within G+? 6. Etc. Now I'm not saying Google are wrong to do this... from their perspective it may well be the right decision. Or it might not. Even companies full of very smart people don't always make good decisions on everything.
- cthackers 13y ago
  I don't get why everybody is so whiny and bitchy about what Google does and does not. It's a public company that's in it for money and all the stuff they make and you use for free - be it good or not; costs a lot of money to maintain and host and develop and all that. It's not their responsibility to privately mail you their road map and spendings and ask your opinion about what to do with their money. I hated when they close products I'm using and I do use a lot of google stuff. But .... for the love of god people...
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    I'm really not sure why your reply is attached to my comment above. I'm not bitching about anything, just observing some random thoughts that one could apply to this sort of decision. I don't begrudge Google anything for shutting down G+ Games, as I never played the first one of them, nor was I ever likely to. It's not their responsibility to privately mail you their road map and spendings and ask your opinion about what to do with their money. I hated when they close products I'm using and I do use a lot of google stuff. But .... for the love of god people... Riiight, not sure if that was meant to be directed to my reply, or if that was happenstance, but I certainly don't claim that Google have a responsibility to mail me anything or solicit my opinion on anything. That said, it's pretty clear why people make a big deal out of these announcements: Google are so large and powerful and have such a disproportionate amount of influence over what happens on the Web these days, that everything they do impacts a lot of people and likely has ripple effects throughout the entire ecosystem. So it's hardly unreasonable for people to take notice and comment on this stuff.

dwc 13y ago

When they launched Games on G+ I was pretty excited. I went to play and was greeted with "Games are social!" along with a prompt to share all my social networking info with 3rd parties. Decline and you can't play. Games are social? I'm supposed to hear "social" and just enthusiastically agree to that? Sorry, but no. I never went back.

chintan 13y ago

I think the killer feature was ability to use "Hangout" with G+ Games. Sigh! I had a half baked card game (where seeing other peoples faces was a critical element) that I was planning to implement on G+.

jmillikin 13y ago
If you're willing to require your players to use modern browsers (Firefox and Chrome), and don't care about social network integration, then http://www.webrtc.org/ http://www.webrtc.org/ should be a great alternative.
- chintan 13y ago
  aha! neat, thanks!
- ysangkok 13y ago
  Flash has this feature for at least 10 years now. So no need to exclude. Proof: http://web.archive.org/web/20031221102318/http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/help04.html http://web.archive.org/web/20031221102318/http://www.macrome...
dragonwriter 13y ago
> I think the killer feature was ability to use "Hangout" with G+ Games.</blockquote> Apps (games or not) can still interact with Hangouts via the Hangouts API, which is not affected by G+ Games shutting down. > Sigh! I had a half baked card game (where seeing other peoples faces was a critical element) that I was planning to implement on G+. Aside from embedding the game in the G+ Web UI, what are you missing that you would have had with G+ Games with existing G+ APIs (Hangouts, Moments) and the Google Play Game Services API? AFAICT, shutting down G+ Games just means that the Google+ UI as a portal to web games is going away.

evolve2k 13y ago

Closing Down! Everything must Go!

metaphorm 13y ago

can someone explain to me why people view service shutdown's (by Google in particular, it seems) as some kind of epic betrayal? In every other industry, discontinuing a product is a non-event. In fact, even within the software industry its usually a non-event. Nobody is out there screaming havoc when Goodyear tire discontinues a product line that wasn't selling well. Google isn't allowed to do the same?

methodin 13y ago

I forgot that games even existed on it. Did anyone use it? Seems to confirm that Facebook is indeed not their actual competitor.

nichols 13y ago

Google's new project will be robots responsible for shutting down old services and groups. Rumor has it that they'll be called "Terminators," and they'll look kind of like this: http://imposetonwallpaper.free.fr/wallpapers/films/terminator/Terminator3T800.jpg http://imposetonwallpaper.free.fr/wallpapers/films/terminato...