The Benefits of iGoogle to Distribute Your Games…

The benefits of iGoogle as a distribution channel for your games…

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/igoogle-podcast.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]Pbf0dlESX8E[/wp_youtube]

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the Game Developers Conference at a special event by Google. How about you introduce yourself?

Kevin: Hi, I’m Kevin Thom, one of the Product Managers on iGoogle.

Interviewer: You did a gaming announcement today. What’s that about?

Kevin: Today we released over 20 games for iGoogle. Some of the games are the hottest games today, including Mario, World of Warcraft, Zelda, Guitar Hero and tons more. The launch today really helps users who are fans of games realize their wishes. It is a reflection of their interest, and the games help them do that.

Additionally, we are demo-ing some of the social games in development for iGoogle, including games like Zenga, Chess.com and ClayFish as well as other developers. We’re hoping by the social iteration social games will become the forefront of the iGoogle experience.

Interviewer: You know, is the social game’s component live already on iGoogle, or is that coming out later or what?

Kevin: You can really use the open social APIs and the iGoogle sandbox so we encourage developers to go inside and start the social games. We hope to lauch open source iGoogle in the near future, but we don’t have a specific timeline for those.

Interviewer: So, if an indie game developer wants to get involved and develop a game, what’s the distribution opportunity and how many people can it reach and how do they actually reach these people?

Kevin: iGoogle has tens of millions of users today. It’s been one of Google’s fastest growing products in the last several years running. We’re very excited about iGoogle. We recently launched Chat on iGoogle as well so it’s continually evolving. Open social and social games is something that we’re really excited about and we look to social for beginning developers. They can sign up for our sandbox and just start development. Right now, we support the open social APIs for the sandbox and we’re looking to roll out them out in production soon.

iGoogle’s audience is global. We have about 50 percent of our users in the U. S. but we have very significant sized user bases in many other countries. We are in over 40 countries across the world, over 40 branches in 70 countries. There really is a quite broad opportunity and we’re excited about havaing open source in iGoogle.

Interviewer: If a game developer wants to monetize, is there an opportunity to do that yet, or is this more a way to promote their game on another site?

Kevin: We’re advertising. Developers can choose any app that they want and they keep all the revenue that that app provider provides them. We think that there are interesting monetizing opportunities for developers and given the size of the audience and the types of casual games that are already popular on iGoogle, we think that the audience is ready for a lot of new and exciting social games.

Interviewer: Now, is there a way to get listed? As more developers start releasing applications for iGoogle, is there going to be a way to easily stand out in the crowd, like how does the listings work? And how does, say, a smaller developer get an opportunity to actually be ranked or listed in the top?

Kevin: Sure. We have a gadgets directory and we use special algorithms in that directory to rank the content based on what’s hot recently. So, it’s not based on total popularity necessarily across all time. That’s one of the options, but the default sort is basically what’s hot essentially. If your app is being added to a lot of users pages and the user are keeping the app and using it, it will rise in the directory and reach organic growth by the iGoogle directory.

We’re also going to expose some of the APIs from open source and allow gadget developers or rather allow users to invite their friends to play games with them, to share content with them and really allow hope that it allows users to get the most relevant content on their personalized page.

Interviewer: And so, if someone develops for MySpace and they’ve already made a game, is it going to be really easy to come to iGoogle then; if they develop for Orchid or is the container different?

Kevin: That’s our goal. The open social APIs that run on MySpace market are essentially the same, and we’ve seen a lot of good offers come to us and we’ve been able to port games in a matter of hours or a day, not weeks. So, we think there is a very strong opportunity for open source developers to take some of the games that are hot that are on social networks and bring them to iGoogle. iGoogle is a little bit different because it’s a private personalized home page. It is not a social network. Other people are not going to meet you. The users page is really meant for the log in user.

We are encouraging game developers to think about creative ways to push fresh content to the user and think about the different types of content.

Interviewer: How would you have friends within that context if it’s a personalized page and it’s not really a social network? How does that exactly work?

Kevin: Well, I think a good example is the books gadget [?]. When I log in I would love to see the books that my friends have recommended, recently reviewed or share it with me. Moreover, I would like to be able to see if it’s in their library and if I can actually request to borrow it from them. I can do that without having to go to their profile page or anything like that. Pushing that sort of content on the iGoogle page is part of what is iGoogle’s mission, and we’re really excited about that.

Games, as well. A lot of the games on iGoogle were in that private context. A lot of people see iGoogle as their personalized newspaper, the morning newspaper. People will play the crossword. They’ll play other games in the morning newspaper. A lot of those things will work very well on iGoogle.

Interviewer: Can you talk about some of the popular games that are already on iGoogle?

Kevin: Sure. So, I talked a little bit about the morning newspaper games, so it goes through crosswords and things like that. Those are very popular. We have some casual games. One called color [?] where you try and remove all the blocks from the screen and leave as few blocks remaining as possible. We’ve seen some card games, things like that.

Interviewer: I think I saw Aquarium. I don’t know if Aquarium is popular on iGoogle or not.

Kevin: I don’t actually know off the top of my head whether it’s currently popular. We’re really excited about the things that are being done here today, so like who has the biggest grin on iGoogle from ClayFish. We think that’s going to be a great app, and Jenga has a lot of apps in the works. They’re demo-ing Mafia Wars tonight which is going to be really great on iGoogle so we’re excited. We think that there’s definitely room for both large companies and individuals to come in and really develop their games.

Interviewer: Any last words then for indie game developers who want to get started or building a high profile app?

Kevin: Sure. I think iGoogle users, the best thing to keep in mind is that we want iGoogle to be their personal home on the web. They choose all the content on their iGoogle page. They choose the order. They choose the theme and style of the page and so really think about what makes iGoogle unique. What uses or what are they looking for when they log on to the web every day and what they want to see on their home page.

We think that those are the apps that are going to be successful on iGoogle. If you are interested in developing, check out our documentation blog code.google.com. Sign up for our sandbox. Join our development forum and we’re more than happy to reach out. We’re excited to work with you.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.

Kevin: Thank you.