I think it had its intended goal; jabsters is exactly the kind of person I'd want at Google I/O (rather than someone just hoping for a discount on a new Nexus-whatever-they-give-away-this-time)
2012 was probably the best overall in terms of retail price of giveways relative to registration fee: Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Asus Nexus 7, Nexus Q and Samsung Chromebox.
Last year was Chromebook Pixels which by themselves retail for more than $900.
In the case of Google IO though the freebies were such a good deal that many non-developers who are constantly looking to resell hot gadgets (the slickdeal-reading types who camp out at walmart before a new console release and try to buy 5 units so they can "flip" them on ebay) tend to come out of the woodwork when IO rolls around. This seems to contribute to the massive amount of registration interest Google IO gets relative to the size of the event (combined with the fact that all the talks are published in video form right after the conference) and the anecdotal rapid drop-off in attendees present at the conference from day to day.
Maybe they could key the freebie devices to your Google I.D. and use a non-OEM plain plastic ziplock so that the flippers will have to manually wipe it and list it as "open box" on Ebay.
Anyway, I enjoy watching the keynotes and classes from the comfort of my home office. You can't beat the price.
Normally I love puzzles like this, but how many tickets could they have possibly given away with these codes? Compared with the total number of attendees, these were just a drop in the bucket. The overwhelming majority are simply going to be lottery winners. I fail to see how that is an improvement.
So while I do think the scavenger hunt is very Googleish, I still don't think the overwhelming majority of attendees will have gotten passes as a result, so I don't think this game really does much to tilt the needle. Most of the attendees will have fronted their $300 or $900 and will have been selected at random instead of by merit.
I'm still looking forward to the event but I can't help but be disappointed by the result and I'm not sure this particular selection process will have generated the best pool of attendees. Demand simply exceeds supply, and no matter what selection criteria have been used, someone more deserving will be left out. I don't necessarily qualify that by suggesting that I'm more deserving, just that this process accentuates it.
Ultimately it is Google's event to run and there is something to be said about providing an equal chance to everyone, but there are tradeoffs with this approach.