Google Games: Will It Work?

Written by Eelke Mol on July 12th, 2010 | 1 comment

There has been some talk about Google starting up a games hub together with game maker Zynga, famous for creating Farmville, Mafia Wars and Café World to name a few.

This sounds like a solid plan, teaming up an internet giant with a games giant, but how successful is Google likely to be this time with a history of failed introductions in the past year?

Now it has not yet been confirmed that this is actually taking place, we got it from Mashable who got it from TechCrunch

But Google has not been very lucky the last couple of times with introducing new functions and products. Take Google Wave for example. Before launch everyone was talking about it and anxiously waiting for an invite but as soon as everyone had a decent group of Wave-buddies around them, things pretty much stalled and most people returned to Google Docs.
The other example is Google Buzz. Again, people were crazy exited at the launch but now everyone has had it synced with Twitter and no one actively uses it. And of course the big failure regarding the privacy of Buzz didn’t help.
These mishaps (among other things) are causing people to be sceptic about anything Google releases, such as Google Me.

Why is it that Google gets us all exited beforehand only to disappoint us when the product is in use? I think a major reason is the fact that Google releases a lot of stuff that is still in the beta stadium. On the one hand that’s cool because you can get to use the product sooner and you can help to improve it by giving feedback. But on the other hand, beta still means ‘not finished’ so you are likely to bump into nasty flaws that might put you off the product for good.

So if Google wants to make this alleged Zynga collaboration work, I think they should keep the beta version inside for a good while so when the actual launch is there, we can expect a more or less solid product that people are actually going to use.

What about you? Do you use Wave or Buzz actively? Do you think it’s a good idea for Google and Zynga to team up?

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