Google storms the Facebook Castle with Google+, does it help social games?

A while ago, a story about Warren Buffet gained a lot of traction in the tech world. The story focused on a description of Google made by Buffet, who said that great companies have core products (castles) that they then build features and services around to prevent competitors from getting to the core product (moats). Google’s castle is search, and the moat is gmail, google voice, chrome, and the other products Google puts around the search to control the user experience.

Google has had a history of launching some pretty mediocre products and making some strange acquisitions, but a week after Google+’s launch, it is starting to look like there was some semblance of a plan behind the seemingly crappy launches. Google Buzz, Wave, Picassa, +1 and Blogger were hardly search related, unlikely to become castles, and unlikely to serve as moats, but now seeing the Google+, circle-based social network, it actually seems like they are moats for the new castle. All of those products either taught Google something about how to build the new social castle, or will help “moat” that castle. And Google+ actually seems like it’s being widely praised – a great comic I saw noted that the only way to describe the service is as a Facebook that isn’t like Facebook, which is a testament more to how strong Facebook’s grasp has been on everything social for last 6 years than a statement about our collective distate for Facebook.

If Google+ catches on, users will be faced with a choice of either using both services, or staying exclusively on one or the other. The real risk for Facebook is that, even if people choose the former, it may cut time on the site in half. Half the eyeballs = half the time spent viewing ads = half the ad revenue, which is obviously not a good thing for a company that makes a lot of it’s money off of ads. The other issue is social games – Google+ will definitely become a games platform eventually, as early reports are already considering. So far, the main criticism of Zynga’s IPO has been that Zynga is tied to Facebook, but that looks like it should really be a criticism of Facebook at this point, as Zynga now has a major player they can jump ship to, or at least use as negotiating leverage. One wonders what the exact contents of that non-compete deal Facebook and Zynga signed back in late 2010, and if there is any chance it considered some sort of exclusivity for Facebook. The negotiations at that point in time probably looked an awful lot different though, with no clear alternative for Zynga to publish games on besides Facebook. Now, however, Zynga might actually be in a position to push for a better % of their own revenue (Facebook takes 30%) given that Zynga could potentially swing hundreds of millions of users over to Google+ pretty easily. That move might be too risky for a company waiting to go public, but it will definitely be an interesting standoff between Facebook and Zynga whenever Google+ does open a games platform to the public. A public games platform on Google+ would only help social games as a whole – though the 30% cut seems like an industry standard for all game-hosting platforms, at least it will allow developers to have some sway over the policies that Facebook and Google come up with, and react to them by investing more heavily in one platform over the other. Another interesting thing will be whether game development for Google+ looks more like game development for the Android platform, or if it will be an entirely new experience. It seems the possibilities for games on a new platform similar to Facebook would be more inspiring for developers than just a new version of Android, but on the other hand, opening up the Android platform to Google+ would allow minimal investment from current developers, and give Google+ instant access to games available on the platform. All in all, Google+ will have a big impact on social games, we just don’t know what that impact will be exactly until Google makes their move.