When the games launched I went to try a few and they all demanded to know my personal information - name, birth date, etc. I was pretty offended by that and never bothered going further. I'm generally OK with targeted advertising but there is zero reason for a game to need to know my full name and birth date.
Put it this way, if Google+ remains a nerdvana, then it has lost. Google wants Google+ to be a household name. Not a niche product. It may well die a slow and painful death if it doesn't gain widespread use and adoption. Either way a nerdvana or equivalent means Google+ will never have reached its potential or what it set out to be. That's a huge failure in the scheme of things. Remember, Google changed EVERYTHING to center around Google+.
Google wants to remain one of the biggest and most relevant brands in technology to EVERYONE. Not just people interested in Linus Torvalds post comments.
March at GDC 2012, Punit Soni, lead product manager for Google+ games and mobile: "Games are key to the success of Google+"
Hacker News comments can be so out of touch with what's at stake, what is reality and what they view as "great" for their own skewed opinions. Hacker News readers are meant to understand intended audiences and project goals. Not feel relieved that games are gone.
Link Quote: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/168726/Nine_months_later_...
Games, as currently implemented on social networks, are a terrible and useless waste of human time. (Imagine a true social networking game. We haven't seen it yet, but it's out there somewhere. But trying to figure out how to make people come back to your app every two hours to "harvest crops" is dumb.)
Could you explain your reasoning? I'm not sure why you believe this to be the case. Introducing games was just one sign that they wanted to attract a wider demographic.
Games are an extra reason for people to visit the site regularly, perhaps many times per day. That increases the users exposure to your advertising and creates more opportunity for them to add some information to your database (people are more likely to post an arbitrary thought if they are already logged in to check on their farm than if they'd have to open a new browser window specifically to do so) which both helps you target your advertising and (if you are lucky enough to have people who care about what you say) may provide more reason for other people to visit regularly.
But I also know that's not what Google wants. Google wants the herd. They don't want to be 2nd (or 3rd). And if you want the "herd" you cater to the herd.
On a different note, I think that Google is basically implementing games perfectly on Google+. The reason people hate games on Facebook (and consequently, without thinking, want them gone on Google+) is because Facebook is constantly pestering you to "play Foo Game 2000 with such and such a friend", or "such and such a friend go 10000 points in Foo Game 2000". I've never once seen this on Google+. Gaming on Google+ is completely separate from its other functions (which are in turn just ways to tie Google's multitude of services together).
Google+ does social gaming perfectly, and if there's a tie in with Android gaming I think it could really take off. Imagine games that save your progress between the browser and your phone, and allow you to do all the social things that OpenFeint tries to do (but fails at).
Then again, we all remember Farmville. We can live without that on G+.
Just keep that crap out of my news feed (cough Facebook cough) and all is well.
I don't give two craps that you opened a fortune cookie and now you want me to open one.
Facebook will be a thing of the past. I logged in after a long time and the UI is still cluttered with game requests, fortune cookie requests, kiss requests all other garbage I am not fond of.
Yes I can ignore these apps, but I'd rather not waste my life click ignoring on each of these stupid apps. G+ has a good signal to noise ratio on content I SUBSCRIBE to and that is why I let them use my data.
I wished g+ don't have such craps at all.
http://coryliu.com/post/8637665056/google-plus-sucks-for-soc...
Perhaps G+ was skating where the puck was, instead of where the puck should be?
