mikejuk writes “SuperPoke Pets is another casualty of Google’s aggressive spring cleanup… But unlike other users of Google’s trashed software, Superpoke users have decided to fight back with a class action. The aim is to recover the money they spend on virtual gold used as a currency to buy clothes for their virtual pets. The total ‘amount in controversy’ exceeds $5,000,000 — a sum that is credible given that there were at least 7,000,000 users. So if you are considering adding a virtual currency to your app you might want to think of the future.”
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Published by
timothy on
Jan 01, 2012
An anonymous reader writes to point out this interesting outgrowth of Google’s Native Client: a Google engineer has ported MAME 0.143 to the browser-based platform, and written about the process in detail, outlining the overall strategy employed as well as specific problems that MAME presented. An impressive postscript from the conclusion: “The port of MAME was relatively challenging; combined with figuring out how to port SDL-based games and load resources in Native Client, the overall effort took us about 4 days to complete.”
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Zothecula writes “Anyone who has a attended a LAN party — where people connect their computers on one network in one location to play multiplayer games together — can tell you that they can be both very fun but also kind of a hassle. Playing games with your friends all in the same room: fun. Having to organize all your friends to each haul their usually-oversized gaming rigs to one person’s house, ensuring they all have the same software, and inevitably dealing with one or more people having trouble connecting: not fun. With that in mind, it makes sense that one Google employee decided to bypass all that inconvenience and just build a house specifically for LAN parties, complete with multiple networked computers and TVs connected to game consoles.”
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derGoldstein writes with this quote from the official Google blog:
“Today we’re adding games to Google+. … We want to make playing games online just as fun, and just as meaningful, as playing in real life … When you’re ready to play, the Games page is waiting — click the games button at the top of your stream. You can see the latest game updates from your circles, browse the invites you’ve received and check out games that people you know have played recently. The Games page is also where your game accomplishments will appear. So you can comfortably share your latest high score — your circles will only see the updates when they’re interested in playing games too.”
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An anonymous reader tips news of a Google job listing indicating the company’s interest in building a gaming division. “The broad job posting requires someone to lead the new venture from designing the user experience, working on partnerships with developers and working with the gaming community.” According to the posting, they are “looking for a strategic, technical and game-loving Product Manager to drive Google’s gaming strategy. You will design strategies for game distribution and discovery, player identity, game mechanics, and more.”
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natecochrane writes “Looking for a new job? Then Google and Microsoft have 6200 roles globally this quarter up for grabs, the first salvos in a costly war for talent. Google alone will hire 6200 engineers, executives and sales staff this year — its biggest intake ever. This story details where the biggest bucks and most fun jobs are to be had and how you can apply for them. There’s even a job for an Xbox PR person — fancy being paid to play with toys all day?”
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ashidosan writes “Hot on the heels of the Adafruit competition, Matt Cutts (a search spam engineer at Google) is sponsoring two more $1,000 bounties for projects using Kinect. ‘The first $1,000 prize goes to the person or team that writes the coolest open-source app, demo, or program using the Kinect. The second prize goes to the person or team that does the most to make it easy to write programs that use the Kinect on Linux.’”
Relatedly, reader imamac points out a video showing Kinect operating on OS X.
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A few years ago we reported that it had been proven that Rubik’s Cubes could be solved in 23 moves. Well now that number is
down to just 20. Proving it required 35 years of computer time donated by Google to get it done.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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.”
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Published by
kdawson on
May 24, 2010
The folks at Rescue-Time, who make software that helps you (and companies) figure out how you spend your online time, did a modest calculation based on their user base and concluded that Google’s playable PAC-MAN doodle cost the world over 4.8 million person-hours of productivity last Friday. “Google PAC-MAN consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6M daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day). $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, if the average Google user has a cost of $25/hr. (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate). For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 Google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get six weeks of their time.”
Also, Google made the doodle permanent.
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