Zynga Investment May Herald Google Games 186
A post at TechCrunch claims knowledge of large investments from Google into social game company Zynga, makers of FarmVille and Mafia Wars. The amount of money involved is not small — somewhere in the $100-200 million range — and could facilitate Google's expansion into the games market. Quoting:
"The investment was made by Google itself, not Google Ventures, say our sources, and it's a highly strategic deal. Zynga will be the cornerstone of a new Google Games to launch later this year, say multiple sources. Not only will Zynga's games give Google Games a solid base of social games to build on, but it will also give Google the beginning of a true social graph as users log into Google to play the games. And I wouldn't be surprised to see PayPal being replaced with Google Checkout as the primary payment option. Zynga is supposedly PayPal's biggest single customer, and Google is always looking for ways to make Google Checkout relevant."
Re:Relevant. (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, I'm always looking for ways to make Paypal less relevant.
The funny thing is, PayPal is mostly just relevant in the US and other western countries. Other countries have better online systems with full encyption, added security and several ways to use their system, and people happily use these to pay their phone and tv bills and everything else. You can also top up your account by buying one of the several coupons from the kiosk near you.
It's actually quite funny how US people put up with PayPal and their shitty and insecure system.
Crap Flash Games (Score:5, Interesting)
This is more likely to herald the entrance of Google into crap, very buggy flash games with unsubtle ways to get children to bug their parents to pay for very expensive pixels to put in their crap flash game.
Re:Crap Flash Games (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm rather surprised Google would invest in Zynga, considering their reputation for working with spyware, scam deal sites, personal information harvesters, and other things that Google would warn you about if you clicked on them in Chrome.
Not that it matters much, but this actually tarnishes my opinion of Google a bit.
Re:Crap Flash Games (Score:2, Interesting)
Perhaps they took that into account, thinking they might clean that up a bit while they go along. It would make no sense at all for most businesses to do something like that, but Google makes strange business decisions.
I feel (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Another Yahoo? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yahoo!'s (and most of the other search engines) problems was, that they tried to promote most of the auxiliary services through the main site. Though Yahoo! isn't exactly loosing, they just did not get the majority of the search market, but for instance in Japan they are highly popular.. they are also the forth most visited site on the Internet [alexa.com], I wouldn't call that exactly loosing.
Google is doing a lot of stuff too, but most of it is standing alone (i.e. youtube) and is self-promoting.
They could clean up the start page a bit (or at least make it more customizable), but generally they are doing search + ads as primary business and the other stuff is loosely connected.
As for checkout.. well, PayPal was the first major popular global Internet payment option, but they are causing a lot of grief lately and will loose importance.
What will succeed them? My best bet is Amazon Payments [amazon.com], as they have attractive payment conditions (the nearest I have seen so far to micro-payments) and they have an established customer base with access to bank account data and _some_ trust of the users.
Google has no business where people regularly spend money from their account. They will have a hard time to make people set up payment account on their site, but it's not impossible.
Google's Defense of Flash (Score:3, Interesting)
This probably sheds some new light into Google's sudden defense of Flash blog post from June 29
http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html [youtube.com]
Investing in a bunch of Flash games means they have to now start propping up the Flash platform instead of only touting the virtues of HTML5.
Re:Zynga are evil (Score:3, Interesting)
How is PayPal evil?
Full disclosure, I'm a PayPal engineer.
We can use some Google influence in gaming (Score:3, Interesting)
thus some google influence may be good in this sector. we need more gameplay, more fun, entertainment in games.
Re:Relevant. (Score:3, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:On-line_payment [wikipedia.org]
eg: Moneybookers
Re:Zynga are evil (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a friend who has worked in Fraud for years and years. I wouldn't call him evil or a dick. In fact, he's one of the better people I know. He went through training to become a Sheriff so he could help people even more, but PayPal ended up bringing him back to work for them.
When people tell me their account was closed for "bullshit reasons", the most common cause for that is someone putting up a PayPal donation link, claiming their site is a non-profit/charity, and not getting off their ass to file paperwork with PayPal. In that case, PayPal is only upholding federal law because we're heavily regulated.
In fact, I've seen two different stories on Slashdot about PayPal locking accounts of FOSS companies over that very reason. There isn't much we can about federal laws.
However, if you think you've got a legitimate gripe, email me at enderandrew at gmail dot com and I'll talk to people at work.
Re:Zynga are evil (Score:3, Interesting)
I've only been with PayPal for 8 months. She got caught in a phishing scheme years ago. I had no influence on the events. PayPal contacted the banks that handled her checking account and credit cards, and had all the charges reversed in 3 days.
Their fraud policies are one Google search away.
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/Marketing/securitycenter/buy/Protection-outside [paypal.com]
The OP suggested they are evil because they don't provide fraud protection. They do, and have for years. They also actively go after people for phishing scams.
If there is something evil about the company I work for, I'd like to know. It would certainly influence my decision to continue working there or not. But so far, I haven't seen anything actually evil about the company.
Re:Relevant. (Score:3, Interesting)
That's why I laugh at US citizens crying about PayPal. For PayPal to operate in Australia they have to adhere to Australian regulations, so I've never actually had any real problems with them. We have strong consumer protection laws (providing people are willing to use them) so screwing over customers isn't a huge option.
Maybe instead of crying foul in PayPal, cry foul on your consumer protection laws. Oh wait, you want small government. The prices you pay for your supposed freedoms.
Re:Zynga are evil (Score:3, Interesting)
PayPal did have a proper bank before way back in the day. It was the first online bank, called X.com I do believe. X.com is now used for developer tools.
Banks are regulated differently. I know PayPal has looked at trying to either have a proper bank back end again, but hasn't yet. Banks aren't seen in a very positive light right now, which may be part of the decision Walmart also stopped their efforts at forming a bank.
Re:Zynga are evil (Score:1, Interesting)
Assuming you're not trolling, the evilness of PayPal is pretty much legendary (just google for "paypal evil", "paypal steals" or "paypal sucks"): they are known to cancel/freeze accounts for strange/arguable reasons and they can (and have, in the past) basically "stolen" money (including, but not limited to, charity money).
I'm not claiming they aren't any better now (I have no idea if they are), but the fact that you seem to ignore the existence of all past PayPal drama seems to indicate that either you're trolling or you just haven't been on the Internets for long.
How is it that nobody has mentioned? (Score:3, Interesting)
How is it that nobody has mentioned that this is just the sort of thing to help launch Google Me? Google needs someone on their social network to bring people over, and as many people as like playing these social games, it won't be that hard to get people onto Google Me from using this.
So between Zynga leaving Facebook but people loving the games and people being upset with Facebook, now's the perfect time for Google to make deals to get people onto their social network.