Google shows the Future of Browser Games
1up.com
1up.com
"USD only for App developers, WWW for buyers"
I translate it to myself:
"west: place with creative smart people. rest: dumb idiot consumers"
This is what always happen with 'gaming marketplaces', and 'mobile marketplaces'. This is the case with XNA, X-Box Live, android market etc... As someone from Hungary (Eastern Europe) I was naive enough to get excited about some of these in the past. I no longer do that. My first task is to check for this 'west-rest' rule. If I smell this I avoid the stuff like plague.
Maybe a good startup idea for someone who is reading this: create non-protectionist gaming marketplaces? I think there would be huge demand for that.
As developer friendly Google generally is, i find this kind of attitude very annoying. The fact that the android marketplace is closed to lots of countries even two years (!!) after launch certainly tames any optimistic posture one might take regarding Google's attitude towards rest of the world developers.
EDIT: A cursory search on google indicates it's possible, but it seems like a field rife with scams. Any advice from someone who has done it before would be highly appreciated.
Look around at the plethora of ways to accept payment and send money online. Dozens of them, right? How many of them allow payouts to non-US citizens? One.
PayPal, that's it. That's the only company that's managed to even partially solve the horrible problem of how to put money into a non-US bank account and not immediately go out of business due to fraud. They solved this because solving fraud issues is the only thing they do. And it took them a long time. And still they can't figure out how to do it for over half the countries in the world.
Google doesn't hate Hungarians. They just don't know how to send you money. Try not to hold it against them.
How can be there fraud? If I specify someone else's bank account number then only I can lose on that. I cannot imagine how could I do any 'fraud'. This is beyond me.
Edit: It is quite absurd. We have a global economy in which it is easy for the money to flow in one direction but very hard (or sometimes impossible) to flow in the other.
If I am a game producer, and I specify this credit card as the destination of the money I earned, then I only make the card owner a favor!
On the other hand if I buy games using this credit card I cause harm to the credit card owner.
Still, they happily allow you to be a consumer but not a producer.
They (Google, in this case) have to ensure that they are complying with appropriate company/tax/accounting/privacy/etc. laws for each country. This may not be as easy as rubber-stamping some forms, so they have to prioritise countries they are familiar with and are can already do business in.
Doesn't Moneybookers work too?
On the other hand IE team spreads FUD about Chrome: http://geektechnica.com/2010/04/microsoft-continues-its-trad...
Things like this is why its easy to dislike MSFT and trust Google (despite privacy concerns). I have said this before and I will say it again, IE can be the fastest, most standard compliant and most secure browser out there and I would still not use it.
I think NaCl is the single biggest part of all this. As I said in another comment here:
I see NaCl as the only actual reason why things will move to being almost totally web-based, and a damn good one at that. It's the ultimate merger of both worlds, and you can (and they do / will) sandbox every application (something I've wanted since I started looking into computers at all). Easy installing + easy purchasing + easy updates + performance = win.
Yup, Google does this a lot.
Basically, will current AAA game industry shift to use HTML5 or will browser makers be eager enough to get AAA titles to their platform that they will offer native clients in browsers.
I think we will see a lot more of HTML5 games. Time is needed so JavaScript engines still enhance a bit, as well as browser's rendering engines. Everything else will be palliated by libraries providing a good game development environment for games in JavaScript.
For the moment flash has an enormous edge, but i don't see anything preventing canvas+JavaScript to become a very good platform for gaming in the next 3 or 4 years. Whether it will be used or not is another question.
On the other hand i don't see Native Client having a big success. I could very well be wrong about that, and it's really just a feeling, since with proper ecosystem and integration, it could become a lot better than flash for web game development.
Computer gaming was already a high-end, enthusiast market before the whole phone/tablet thing started. Going forward, it's only going to become more of a niche as the desktop computer becomes strictly a work machine.
Casual entertainment is now delivered through convenient gadgets that work where you are comfortable, instead of chaining you to a desk. Anybody who has some of these gadgets knows that this is the way it must be, and soon that will be everybody.
The technology stack Google is talking about here is nowhere close to being viable for games on gadgets. And the gadgets already have fully realized commercial gaming platforms anyway, that are always going to be way ahead of the web stack.
There is just no reason to make games for the Chrome App Store. Productivity apps are a whole other matter. But games, no.
I'm not sure what you mean by "computer gaming" but if you mean graphic intensive games, I don't think that's what Google is aiming at (at least, not as a priority). Google is aiming at social addictive games that millions of normal people (not hardcore gamers) play, such as farmville and co. Google has already bought/invested in 5 social gaming companies and those are doing great on the "computer gaming" market.
I don't see how they are going to get it on any other gadget platform besides Android, in which case there is no real advantage for the developer over a native Android app.
Honestly, I see NaCl as the only actual reason why things will move to being almost totally web-based, and a damn good one at that. It's the ultimate merger of both worlds, and you can (and they do / will) sandbox every application (something I've wanted since I started looking into computers at all). Easy installing + easy purchasing + easy updates + performance = win.
It also seems that we're moving to a place where people are happy to pay $0.50 for a game if they know that paying means the developer will make more. Better to use the official app store on your new Google computer and pay small amounts for the apps you like than the old way of not being able to find a Flash game hidden among a page of Flash ads.
I'm guessing this service will also have a both a friend list (connected via facebook, twitter or whatever) and/or a lounge or lobby where gamers can make/meet friends and start-up a group game, or just chat in general. Can't really get a critical mass of these at individual game sites.