Top social gaming companies abandon Google+

Google+ continues to struggle as two leading social gaming companies remove their titles from the platform.

The internet conglomerate has fought to make Google+ a viable and suitable contender to big players like Facebook. One such move was by opening up Google+ to social gaming in August 2011.

However PopCap (now owned by Electronic Arts) and Wooga have both withdrawn a number of gaming titles from Google+ in a pivotal move that could signify the end of social gaming for the site.

A spokesperson for EA released a statement saying "PopCap has decided to suspend Bejeweled Blitz on Google+ to redeploy our resources to other adaptations of Bejeweled.

"Certainly, Google is a valuable gaming partner for PopCap and EA, and we'll continue to develop for Google platforms."

Wooga will be pulling three games from Google+ to focus its energies on Facebook.

In response a spokesperson from Google told the Wall Street Journal that "games continue to be an important part of the Google+ platform." Players remaining on the fledgling social network will still have access to 40 games, a figure dwarfed by Facebook’s tens of thousands of gaming apps.

Google’s main USP for gaming companies was that it receives only a 5% take of “virtual goods” sold by those such as Zynga to players on its platforms, compared to Facebook’s 30%; this has been a bone of contention with gaming companies getting into bed with Facebook, despite the social network’s impressive traction rate.

By contrast Google+ has never been able to record such high engagement with its subscribers, resulting in mixed feelings among companies as to the viability of its status as a gaming platform.

Both Facebook and Google gain valuable information about users’ personal interests through the interaction of social gaming, data that proves indispensable to advertisers in an age of hyper-personalisation.