Google+ Adds Games, Minus The Social Games Annoyances

Google’s latest stab at building a social network, Google+, has (as expected) added games to its ever-growing list of services. And while it may have some many of the usual social games suspects, Google+ Games aims for more privacy and less pestering.

“Today we’re adding games to Google+,” the search giant writes on its official blog. “With the Google+ project, we want to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to the web. But sharing is about more than just conversations. The experiences we have together are just as important to our relationships. We want to make playing games online just as fun, and just as meaningful, as playing in real life.”

Google+ Games appears to be rolling out in waves, as changes to Google products are wont to do. The line-up of confirmed games is at least 16 strong, including Rovio’s Angry Birds, PopCap Games’ Bejeweled Blitz, BioWare’s Dragon Age Legends, Zynga Poker and more.

Google says it wants to Google+ Games to be ” there when you want them and gone when you don’t.”

“That means giving you control over when you see games, how you play them and with whom you share your experiences,” the company says, adhering to the social “Circles” structure of Google+ and addressing one of the major annoyances of games that push and pull personal info on rival Facebook.

“If you’re not interested in games, it’s easy to ignore them. Your stream will remain focused on conversations with the people you care about.”

On the company’s developer blog, Google engineering director David Glazer writes that Google+ Games is launching “with a small number of partners so that we could experiment, get the kinks out of our APIs, and get real end-user feedback before opening up to the world. ”

“Because we want to provide both a great user experience and a great developer experience,” Glazer writes, “we’re focusing on quality before quantity.”

Google+ Games is not the company’s first foray into games. The company launched its Chrome Web Store last year, selling and giving away in-browser gaming apps to converts of its Chrome platform. Earlier this year, it began handing out a free version of Rovio’s smash hit Angry Birds to Chrome users.

Games in Google+: fun that fits your schedule [Official Google Blog]


The Cheapest NBN 1000 Plans

Looking to bump up your internet connection and save a few bucks? Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Kotaku, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

Comments


4 responses to “Google+ Adds Games, Minus The Social Games Annoyances”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *