Google developers Mark DeLoura and Michael Mahemoff showed off the latest progress of the Chrome Web Store at the Games Developer Conference in Europe, which is fitting because the Web Store is initially geared around serving online games for Web users.
Google May 19 introduced the Chrome Web Store at Google I/O to help developers put free and paid Chrome Web apps in front of consumers.
The store will enable the roughly 70 million users of the Google Chrome Web browser to not only find Web apps, but create shortcuts in Chrome to access them easier.
The Chrome Web Store will rival Apple’s App Store (What, does Android Market have to be the only Google rival to Apple), but instead of apps for Android smartphones, it will boast apps for tablets and other devices based on Chrome. More on that soon.
The Googlers told the crowd that the Web Store would be open for business in October, according to gaming blog 1Up.com.
Google will collect a 5 percent processing fee, but developers will reap the rest. That should make it duly attractive to programmers tired of giving 20 percent or 30 percent of their app sales.
Why is Chrome good for games? Its speed, of course, as DeLoura points out in this presentation:
Chrome Web store hasn’t launched yet, so who cares? Why is this so exciting?
Opportunities for Chrome Web Store center around the forthcoming Chrome Operating System.
The first tablet computer based on Chrome OS is slated to hit Nov. 26, in time for the Christmas holidays, according to this unverified scoop from the Download Squad.
Chrome OS tablets will provide a nice instrument on which users will play the games they use from the Web Store. Let’s go further down this intriguing rabbit hole.
Sometime around the launch of Chrome Web Store and the Chrome OS tablet, Google will launch Google TV, bringing Chrome Web apps and TV content onto big-screen TVs, powered by a special remote control with a keypad.
That will give users an even greater surface on which to game, assuming it comes to market.
Let’s go further. Web apps and specifically games and the ability for people to congregate around them online are clearly at the forefront of Google’s plans for a social network (allegedly called Google Me).
The company pumped $100 million into Zynga, bought Slide, bought a little gaming startup called Pixie Labs and bagged virtual currency startup Jambool last week.
Chrome Web Store, with its obvious focus on games such as Plants and Zombies, could be a a big piece of this puzzle.
Imagine users accessing and sharing games they downloaded from Chrome Web Store through the Google Me social network. Hello, Facebook!
So, yeah, you could say games are big for Google right now.