Game Design Secrets

Google+ and Chrome: A Secondary Market Worth Watching, Especially in South America

In the next couple of years, Google will almost certainly expand its reach and selection of games featured on Google+, its social network, in a bid to compete with Facebook. As of this writing, it’s still doubtful they can meaningfully catch up with Mark Zuckerberg’s social network as the best platform for web-based games, but the search giant has a number of trump cards to play, including:

• Increased Google+ interconnectivity to its Android line of phones (important to integrate when porting your game to Android!)
• Expanded promotion of Google+ features through its popular Chrome browser
• Services like YouTube

Nexus, a Google tablet, will also appear just before this book goes to print.

• Chromebooks, Google’s new line of laptops
• Any or all of these features could expand Google+’s reach and importance as a web game platform.

Frankly, it’s still my own favorite social network—it’s pretty much designed like a real-world MMO!

What’s more, according to an April 2012 report by the UK web-hosting company Pingdom, Chrome dominates the market in South America (48 percent). As discussed in the last chapter, the audience for web-based games is notably and disproportionately strong in South America. Moreover, the old Google-owned social network Orkut still dominates in the continent’s largest country, Brazil. For those reasons, Chrome-based web games aimed at the South American market are probably ...