
Google+ Games is shutting down - jmillikin
https://support.google.com/plus/answer/3123176?hl=en&ref_topic=1334138
======
nickconfer
In short. Google+ is thriving, but we decided to shut down Google+ Games. Look
away... Look away.

If you paid for anything contact the companies that are already tired of us
and have them solve your problem. Oh and by the way, try our new Google Play
Game Service! Hurry, before it's gone!

~~~
nickconfer
Sorry for the snarky comment. I usually don't make these types of comments but
shutting down a service, asking users to do the leg work to solve game credit
problems, and then marketing a new service in the same post bugs me.

~~~
auxbuss
No, no. You nailed it succinctly and without bitterness. Well played!

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piokoch
That's something that makes me afraid to invest more time in learning Go
language.

What if after investing my time in learning Go, one day I'll see Google blog
post saying:

"Go lang project at Google is shutting down, we will no longer develop that.
But don't worry we decided to donate that project to Apache Software
Foundation! It is now called Apache Go. Look for in ASF incubator, just next
to Apache Wave (formerly known as Google Wave".

~~~
MatthewPhillips
But Go has Rob Pike and Ken Thompson. And a BSD license. I feel like that's as
safe as it gets.

~~~
saidajigumi
Motion seconded. As someone who's worked with more languages than I care to
count, I think Go really is a great contribution. It's not just that there are
big names behind it. I have little doubt that it will stand on its own merits
precisely because of how its creators' experience and clarity of purpose
manifest in pragmatic language design.

FWIW, I'm also _really_ enjoying getting into Rust[1]. At a distance, it's
easy to confuse their purposes: both Rust and Go are superficially "new-world
systems languages". But the goals and influences of each differ considerably,
and this becomes manifest as you dig into them.

[1] Caveat: Rust is definitely still in its pre-release lifecycle. As such
don't expect to launch your-next-great-whatever to production with it. But
it's a great time for language and software enthusiasts to jump in and have
fun.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
One of my biggest problems with Go is that what the authors say it is for and
what people using it for are 2 different things. The authors say it is to
replace systems languages, and as far as I know they've never retracted that
position, whereas in the wild it's being used instead of Python and other
similar scripting languages.

~~~
saidajigumi
I think that's simply a misunderstanding of what "systems language" means. It
does not mean "go write an operating system", even though that's an
application that comes to mind because of C.

From the top of golang.org: "Go is an open source programming environment that
makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software." That's a
pretty general statement. Follow on with this one from [1]: "Go is an attempt
to combine the ease of programming of an interpreted, dynamically typed
language with the efficiency and safety of a statically typed, compiled
language." They're pretty clear that they want to have their cake and eat it
too, regarding the benefits of these language classes.

For more color on Go's origins, focus, and design, I highly recommend the "Go
at Google" talk by Rob Pike, available as video [2] or an edited article
version [3].

[1] <http://golang.org/doc/faq#creating_a_new_language>

[2] <http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Go-Google>

[3] <http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article>

~~~
MatthewPhillips
It's not a misunderstanding at all. From day one the target was C/C++. The
initial demos were all about how fast Go compiles compared to C++.

Hell, that FAQ makes it pretty clear what the target is. Please read "What is
the purpose of the project?" and tell me how the target is anything but
C/C++...

------
salimmadjd
I'm shocked and surprised! How is that possible? after all this was going to
be yet another amazing google product built by bunch of smart people that made
it through 12 rounds of interview process. To paraphrase, "people with no
imaginations hire people with no imagination" :)

~~~
dragonwriter
All shutting down Google+ Games means is that the integration of web games
with the Google+ UI is going away in favor of piecemeal integration. Google+
Games is essentially the _old_ Facebook model that even Facebook-linked games
are using less, the new model (supported by Google Play Game Services, Google+
SSO, the Google+ Moments API, etc.) is of games (quite often native mobile
games rather than web games) that interact with a support platform through a
sign-on API, cloud services that provide saves/multiplayer
toos/leaderboards/acheivements, and systems that allow integration with social
network news feeds.

~~~
tarkin2
This actually makes sense.

The Google play services do seem to offer more.

But do I trust Google's services (especially ones that are open, although I
doubt this is or was the case with games) anymore?

No. I trust them about as much as I trust any company's services.

I just didn't think Google were any company, until recently.

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joyeuse6701
I'm surprised by how many technical people are butt hurt over every subsequent
shutdown of a service after Google Reader. It sucks to invest time and effort
into something that was assumed to exist, however naively, forever. On the
other hand, if we were to hold on to every design and implementation we've
ever created without the ability to throw it away, no matter whom or what
depends on it, our technological progress would probably be slowed.

Could you imagine if every piece of code you wrote once it was functioning,
couldn't be thrown away and you had to support it forever once it existed?
That would blow.

It's much like backwards compatibility decisions. Sometimes you gotta break
free.

Just breathe, remember it's not the end of the world, and if you're on the
self entitlement band wagon, you're going nowhere fast.

~~~
CyberDroiD
I think the correct sentiment: if you're relying on an advertising company
like Google, you're going nowhere fast.

~~~
JoeKM
Relying on a eCommerce company like Amazon, you're going nowhere fast.

I too can make blanket ignorant statements. Google is not just an
advertisement company anymore. Haven't been for awhile.

~~~
frostmatthew
How can you possibly suggest that? For 2012 advertising revenues made up
nearly 95% of Google's total revenue ($43.6B of $46B).
<http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html>

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dwc
When they launched Games on G+ I was pretty excited. I went to play and was
greeted with "Games are _social_!" along with a prompt to share all my social
networking info with 3rd parties. Decline and you can't play. Games are
social? I'm supposed to hear "social" and just enthusiastically agree to that?
Sorry, but no. I never went back.

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jensenbox
Please send me any data regarding Google shutdowns.

<http://jensenbox.github.io/timeline/>

~~~
BoyWizard
One thing that's missing from the timeline is _equivalent services_ that
Google have launched/purchased. For example, Google Video didn't so much 'shut
down' as merge with (the arguably better) Youtube.

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kailuowang
As a shareholder of Google, it's encouraging for me to see that Google shuts
down products that didn't work out really really fast (Nexus Q and now Google+
Games).

~~~
glomph
If only they shut down g+ as fast! :p

~~~
pacomerh
hehe, yeah, Google+ is working, but in a strange way

~~~
mindcrime
FWIW, I generally find that the majority of referral traffic to the Fogbeam
Blog is from Reddit, with Hacker News and/or Twitter next, possibly Slashdot
if we got something on there, and then G+ and "everybody else". Until a week
or so ago... for the first time, I noticed some posts that we put up where we
got more traffic from G+ than from Twitter.

Yeah, it's just one anecdote, and there are all sorts of possible reasons, but
it definitely appears that G+ has it's niche in some regards. It might not
ever displace Facebook as the main 'generic' social network, but it's no
tumbleweed filled wasteland like some people would lead one to believe.

------
mtgx
Google+ Games was not successful. I don't think it's that kind of community.
So it makes sense to shut it down if no one was using it. Wouldn't you agree?

~~~
mindcrime
_Google+ Games was not successful. I don't think it's that kind of community.
So it makes sense to shut it down if no one was using it. Wouldn't you agree?_

Maybe yes, maybe no. I don't think any of us here in the peanut gallery have
enough information to really say. I mean, we can - I suppose - take Google at
their word that it wasn't "successful" but we don't know things like:

1\. Why wasn't it successful?

2\. How are Google defining "successful" here?

3\. Are there other decisions or investments that could still be made to make
it more "successful"?

4\. What are the possible n-th order effects of having a Games ecosystem, even
if it isn't seemingly "successful" in isolation?

4.5 - what are the n-th order effects of the shutdown notice? How will
developers react to this? Does it damage trust in Google as a brand? Will
there be "downstream" fallout from this?

5\. What, if anything, does this say about the possibility of an "apps" (non
game) ecosystem within G+?

6\. Etc.

Now I'm not saying Google are wrong to do this... from their perspective it
may well be the right decision. Or it might not. Even companies full of very
smart people don't always make good decisions on everything.

~~~
cthackers
I don't get why everybody is so whiny and bitchy about what Google does and
does not. It's a public company that's in it for money and all the stuff they
make and you use for free - be it good or not; costs a lot of money to
maintain and host and develop and all that.

It's not their responsibility to privately mail you their road map and
spendings and ask your opinion about what to do with their money. I hated when
they close products I'm using and I do use a lot of google stuff. But .... for
the love of god people...

~~~
mindcrime
I'm really not sure why your reply is attached to my comment above. I'm not
bitching about anything, just observing some random thoughts that one could
apply to this sort of decision. I don't begrudge Google anything for shutting
down G+ Games, as I never played the first one of them, nor was I ever likely
to.

 _It's not their responsibility to privately mail you their road map and
spendings and ask your opinion about what to do with their money. I hated when
they close products I'm using and I do use a lot of google stuff. But .... for
the love of god people..._

Riiight, not sure if that was meant to be directed to my reply, or if that was
happenstance, but I certainly don't claim that Google have a responsibility to
mail me anything or solicit my opinion on anything.

That said, it's pretty clear _why_ people make a big deal out of these
announcements: Google are so large and powerful and have such a
disproportionate amount of influence over what happens on the Web these days,
that everything they do impacts a _lot_ of people and likely has ripple
effects throughout the entire ecosystem. So it's hardly unreasonable for
people to take notice and comment on this stuff.

------
chintan
I think the killer feature was ability to use "Hangout" with G+ Games.

Sigh! I had a half baked card game (where seeing other peoples faces was a
critical element) that I was planning to implement on G+.

~~~
jmillikin
If you're willing to require your players to use modern browsers (Firefox and
Chrome), and don't care about social network integration, then
<http://www.webrtc.org/> should be a great alternative.

~~~
ysangkok
Flash has this feature for at least 10 years now. So no need to exclude.

Proof:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20031221102318/http://www.macrome...](http://web.archive.org/web/20031221102318/http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/help04.html)

------
metaphorm
can someone explain to me why people view service shutdown's (by Google in
particular, it seems) as some kind of epic betrayal?

In every other industry, discontinuing a product is a non-event. In fact, even
within the software industry its usually a non-event. Nobody is out there
screaming havoc when Goodyear tire discontinues a product line that wasn't
selling well. Google isn't allowed to do the same?

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nichols
Google's new project will be robots responsible for shutting down old services
and groups. Rumor has it that they'll be called "Terminators," and they'll
look kind of like this:
[http://imposetonwallpaper.free.fr/wallpapers/films/terminato...](http://imposetonwallpaper.free.fr/wallpapers/films/terminator/Terminator3T800.jpg)

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ckdarby
Almost had a nervous break down because I thought Ingress was going to be
listed >_> !

~~~
kailuowang
I have some concerns over that too, but ingress is completely independent,
which means, if they really don't see it fitting into their strategy they can
either spin it off of sell it to another company, hopefully.

Yes Google reader is somewhat independent too, but at least it has "Google" in
its name. They can't spin it off of sell it.

~~~
anonymfus
Did Google ever sell some business?

~~~
kailuowang
I would say yes if that includes departments of companies they acquired.

~~~
ysangkok
Examples?

~~~
jpatokal
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/dec/20/google-
sell...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/dec/20/google-sells-
motorola-home-arris)

------
unsignedint
Now they have GPG, that's pretty much enables the same kind of functionality
and better outside of Google+ Games. So it makes sense, I guess.

------
methodin
I forgot that games even existed on it. Did anyone use it? Seems to confirm
that Facebook is indeed not their actual competitor.

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evolve2k
Closing Down! Everything must Go!

------
michaelochurch
Well, now the company that treated me like human garbage for pointing out a
doomed product direction will, at least, have to view me as human garbage that
was _right_. Progress, one day at a time.

(My idea that was that we should engage independent developers and provide the
resources to integrate them with Hangouts, thus having a double win because
we'd both (a) get people comfortable with Hangouts and (b) have a higher
quality of games than if we published Zynga dreck.)

~~~
jmillikin

      > Well, now the company that treated me like human garbage
      > for pointing out a doomed product direction will, at
      > least, have to view me as human garbage that was right.
    

Your manifestos were treated with astonishing patience and consideration,
given their content and your reaction to criticism.

As I recall, your position was that Google+ Games should prefer intricate
rulesets based on obscure board- and card-games on the basis that popular
casual games are not sufficiently complex to pose an intellectual challenge.

It seems unlikely that positioning Google+ Games as the place to go for half-
baked Catan knockoffs would have made it more popular.

~~~
bdowney
And still is really sad that Google employees still waste time creating memes
about Michael in their stupid internal memegen site many months after his
departure.

~~~
michaelochurch
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Goldstein>

~~~
yid
Since you seem to be an Ayn Rand fan, this is more like it:

Toohey: "Mr. Roark, we’re alone here. Why don’t you tell me what you think of
me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us."

Roark: "But I don’t think of you."

~~~
michaelochurch
I'm not an Ayn Rand fan, but thanks.

My _Atlas Shrugged_ post was all about how the concept, while appealing,
wouldn't work.

