Google Slides into the Social Game
Google has taken a giant step into social gaming this week with the purchase of the online entertainment company Slide, a San Francisco-based manufacturer of social apps for sites like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, and Google’s own Orkut. TechCrunch reports the deal to have a $182 million price tag.
Through this acquisition, Google and Slide plan to build a community where virtual goods can be created and distributed. The virtual good market could reach up to $835 million and possibly even into the billions, according to Inside Network. Additionally, marketers are excited because users can be manipulated more within social gaming than traditional search engine advertisement. No doubt as a result, rumors have suggested that Google may be teaming up with Farmville creator Zynga, which boasts of 60 million users on Facebook, and growing.
The deal comes at great time for Google given the recent flop of Google Wave, not to mention the buzz Google Buzz failed to generate. This move foreshadows the opportunities in the growing Andriod mobile market, which recently dethroned Blackberry as the #1 OS in America. Ovum, a Datamonitor company, claimed that by 2015, users could be downloading more than 21 billion apps in a year, a staggering jump from the 2 billion downloads in 2009. The fact that Slide and Zynga boast of over $600 million in venture capital from high-profile investors like Khosla Ventures, Mayfield Fund, BlueRun Ventures and Founders Fund, seems to support such a prediction.
Some are a little weary about Google’s purchase of Slide because in 2008, Slide was estimated to be valued at $550 million. Most are wondering why the price was so low, considering Max Levchin, Slide’s CEO and co-founder of PayPal, has always stated that to him, success would be marked when Slide becomes bigger than PayPal. Though Levchin may not have achieved this goal, he is happy about the future of Slide and Google as reflected in his recent comments on the transaction: “Google is committed to building new, open and better ways for people to connect with others. At Slide, we have been focused on building online communities that foster self-expression, creativity and engagement across multiple platforms. Given our shared vision and values, this is a tremendous opportunity for the two companies to come together to change the way people socialize on the web.”
Social networks and online games account for about 33% of the time spent online in the US, according to a Nielsen study, and Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google Inc. In a recent interview Norvig said, “I can’t speak for the whole company, but I guess not embracing the social aspects [was Google's biggest mistake]. Facebook came along and has been very successful, and I may have dismissed that early on.”
Like Facebook’s Mafia Wars, Google is building a social gaming army ready to attack and attract the public, and it wants you!
