Google+ Adding Games to Social Service From Zynga, Rovio
August 11, 2011, 5:44 PM EDTBy Brian Womack
(Updates with comment by Google executive in third paragraph.)
Aug. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Google Inc., owner of the world’s most-used search engine, is adding games to its new social- networking service from developers such as Zynga Inc. and Rovio Entertainment Oy.
Google+, the service that was unveiled at the end of June, will start gradually rolling out the games feature today before making them fully available, said Vic Gundotra, senior vice president, engineering, at Google in a blog post today. The initial developers also include Wooga GmbH, Funzio Inc. and Kabam Inc.
“We want to make playing games online just as fun, and just as meaningful, as playing in real life,” Gundotra said in the blog. “That means giving you control over when you see games, how you play them and with whom you share your experiences. Games in Google+ are there when you want them and gone when you don’t.”
Google+ is the company’s latest effort to help it compete against younger social-networking companies such as Palo Alto, California-based Facebook Inc., which has attracted users to its site with games from providers such as San Francisco-based Zynga and Redwood City, California-based Kabam. The Google service reached 29 million visitors globally in July, according to ComScore Inc. Google+ had reached about 25 million a week before the end of the month.
Google, based in Mountain View, California, rose $13.12, or 2.4 percent, to $562.13 at 4 p.m. New York time on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The shares have dropped 5.4 percent this year.
--Editors: Donna Alvarado, John Lear
To contact the reporters on this story: Brian Womack in San Francisco at bwomack1@bloomberg.net;
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net
