At a press event today, Google unveiled the details of its Chrome Web Store, an HTML5-based app marketplace that operates on top of the Chrome web browser, including games from Electronic Arts and numerous other developers.
"People want to get paid for their apps, but they don't want to trust a small, independent developer. That's one of the problems we wanted to solve with the Chrome Web Store," Google VP of Product Management Sundar Pichai said at the event, as reported by Engadget.
The store, which launched today alongside the announcement, already lists 195 titles in the Games category, including offerings from Namco (Burger Time Deluxe), Zynga (FarmVille) and Digital Chocolate (Millionaire City) designed to run seamlessly inside the newest version of Google's web browser.
But EA Games content was featured at the Web Store's unveiling, with EA COO John Schappert showing off a new version of the company's Pogo Games balloon-popping title Poppit as a free download for the platform. The game will be built-in to the upcoming version 9 of the Chrome browser.
"We were able to convert into a state-of-the-art HTML5 web app in less than 48 hours," Schappert said at the event "It's blazing fast. It's simply the fastest Poppit we've made."
Other EA titles available for download on the Chrome Web Store include existing web games such as FIFA Superstars, Lords of Ultima, Mirror's Edge 2D and Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online.
The latest version of the Chrome browser now supports hardware acceleration for in-browser apps, Google announced today. Google Director of Product Management Brian Rakowski showcased a WebGL demo of a 3D, HTML5 aquarium running in the browser and powered by the computer's GPU.
Google also used the event to reveal details of the Chrome operating system, a netbook platform focused on synchronizing offline work with the cloud-based applications. The operating system is slated for release in mid-2011.
With many of the standards of HTML5 still up in the air (and with a ways to go before landing), this seems a bit premature. Unless Google (or EA?) is trying to promote some of its own ideas of what the standards should be by pushing out loads of content early. Microsoft was universally dumped on for doing this in the past though, so it'll be interesting to see what happens here.
Well, if we waited for the W3C to fully ratify EVERYTHING, we still wouldn't have PNG alpha channel, CSS tables, CSS 2.1, ANY of CSS3 (which has been in development since 2005), etc.
Though really, a lot of this stuff is working fine for a lot of people. See: http://www.caniuse.com for more.
Apps for this can be built using any web tech, server side or client side. Unity and Flash are being used for the heavy stuff -- where as JavaScript just does not muster it. Tiger Woods as an example is Unity, Plants vs Zombies is Flash.
I've been waiting for this! Problem with the vast majority of portal sites, which includes Facebook, is a lack of support for superior technologies such as proper 3D engines that run in a browser. Most of them run only Flash or Java.
What's cool about this is we can link our game through Chrome, once we set up the trust. I checked out a few things, and the app installs are literally invisible and they are tied to your gmail account, so I think you can access apps anywhere. Go ahead and try it. Grab Plants vs Zombies and once you click the install button, it shows up instantly in your gmail apps list and you can play it right away (even though the app itself loads the first time). So it just creates an implicitly trusted hook. No confirmations for installing plugins or anything.
Also it appears everything is currently free with no monetization options yet. However that doesn't stop apps from internally linking to their own solutions, like Tiger Woods or Plants vs Zombies does. I just quickly whipped up a local extension that allows you to do something like this, so it's pretty easy to work with.
I think it may help our game when we launch having it available from the chrome store, even though we already support IE, Firefox, and Chrome. Doesn't look like we have to do anything custom to support this from the others, except just hooking it up to the store. Not completely sure on that yet.
Anyways, the chrome store looks really hackish right now and an ugly clone of the Apple App Store. I'm sure they'll spruce it up over time, but I'm telling you guys... this is going to be big for Indies!
I do wonder when they are going to start selling keywords so that sponsored games show up at the top of the list. Games can be rated and commented on, so maybe highly rated games will float to the top. There's a lot of fur in the air, gonna take awhile before people figure out where exactly everything is going to fit.
Anyways, this is a good step towards judging software by the quality and utility, rather than what it's programmed in. Getting people used to paying for certain web apps, getting developers making web apps worth paying for, sort of a chicken and egg scenario.
Since IE still dominate major proportion of all markets, I doubt HTML5 is coming just by EA and google. Also, lots plugging are full around the world for web games. Java, Flash, Unity, Sliverlight...
I think this is more to have this up and running when the Chrome OS launches than anything. Also, I believe Google is planning to support other third-party plug-ins aside from Flash. I believe I read that Unity and Silverlight would eventually be supported.
Though really, a lot of this stuff is working fine for a lot of people. See: http://www.caniuse.com for more.
What's cool about this is we can link our game through Chrome, once we set up the trust. I checked out a few things, and the app installs are literally invisible and they are tied to your gmail account, so I think you can access apps anywhere. Go ahead and try it. Grab Plants vs Zombies and once you click the install button, it shows up instantly in your gmail apps list and you can play it right away (even though the app itself loads the first time). So it just creates an implicitly trusted hook. No confirmations for installing plugins or anything.
Also it appears everything is currently free with no monetization options yet. However that doesn't stop apps from internally linking to their own solutions, like Tiger Woods or Plants vs Zombies does. I just quickly whipped up a local extension that allows you to do something like this, so it's pretty easy to work with.
I think it may help our game when we launch having it available from the chrome store, even though we already support IE, Firefox, and Chrome. Doesn't look like we have to do anything custom to support this from the others, except just hooking it up to the store. Not completely sure on that yet.
Anyways, the chrome store looks really hackish right now and an ugly clone of the Apple App Store. I'm sure they'll spruce it up over time, but I'm telling you guys... this is going to be big for Indies!
I do wonder when they are going to start selling keywords so that sponsored games show up at the top of the list. Games can be rated and commented on, so maybe highly rated games will float to the top. There's a lot of fur in the air, gonna take awhile before people figure out where exactly everything is going to fit.
Anyways, this is a good step towards judging software by the quality and utility, rather than what it's programmed in. Getting people used to paying for certain web apps, getting developers making web apps worth paying for, sort of a chicken and egg scenario.