Could Google Become a Game Publisher?

Forbes is running a story examining the possibility of Google becoming a games publisher. The launch of their Google Lively 3D world and the acquisition of in-game advertiser AdScape has analysts speculating on whether Google will use its enormous reach to tap into the lucrative games market. "Google also has several existing technologies that could be used to create games. Imagine a flight simulator that uses Google Earth as a backdrop or tracking a spy in a major city via Google Maps' street view. While there would still be significant work required to create a game using these tools, the underlying technology is already fundamentally finished."

Already funding games via GSoC

[morrison]

Google is already a direct investor in games by funding open source gaming projects in the Google Summer of Code. Those participating this year included BZFlag, Battle for Wesnoth, Second Life (Linden Labs), Thousand Parsec, WorldForge, and ScummVM.

That roughly amounts to Google directly funding about 8 staff-years of development effort into open source gaming this year. Pretty damn cool if you ask me.

You can see some of the results from BZFlag's participation last year at http://my.bzflag.org/gsoc/BZGSoC2007.pdf [bzflag.org]

Re:Already funding games via GSoC

[morrison]

Oops, wrong link! The write-up of BZFlag's participation is at http://my.bzflag.org/gsoc/bzflag_gsoc2007_post_mortem.pdf [bzflag.org] (15.5MB PDF) Since I'm tossing out links, this one is a simple summary of the program: http://my.bzflag.org/gsoc/GSoC2007_Overview.pdf [bzflag.org] (1.7MB PDF)