"west: place with creative smart people. rest: dumb idiot consumers"
This is what always happen with 'gaming marketplaces', and 'mobile marketplaces'. This is the case with XNA, X-Box Live, android market etc...
As someone from Hungary (Eastern Europe) I was naive enough to get excited about some of these in the past. I no longer do that. My first task is to check for this 'west-rest' rule. If I smell this I avoid the stuff like plague.
Maybe a good startup idea for someone who is reading this: create non-protectionist gaming marketplaces? I think there would be huge demand for that.
No need to go looking for conspiracy theories. The reason they don't do this is simple: It's hard.
Look around at the plethora of ways to accept payment and send money online. Dozens of them, right? How many of them allow payouts to non-US citizens? One.
PayPal, that's it. That's the only company that's managed to even partially solve the horrible problem of how to put money into a non-US bank account and not immediately go out of business due to fraud. They solved this because solving fraud issues is the only thing they do. And it took them a long time. And still they can't figure out how to do it for over half the countries in the world.
Google doesn't hate Hungarians. They just don't know how to send you money. Try not to hold it against them.
I don't understand why paying me money is a problem, and I don't get it what kind of fraud are we speaking about.
Normally the following should happen:
1.I create an account on their site with my username and password. I log in with this account.
2. I upload the contents (game).
3. Logged in with this account I could:
a.: specify my PayPal account to thich I expect the money to be transfered.
b.: specify my international bank account number (SWIFT code)
How can be there fraud? If I specify someone else's bank account number then only I can lose on that. I cannot imagine how could I do any 'fraud'. This is beyond me.
Edit: It is quite absurd. We have a global economy in which it is easy for the money to flow in one direction but very hard (or sometimes impossible) to flow in the other.
Stealing credit card numbers, creating accounts with those CC#s, and using purchases to drain them into your account is the first thing that comes to mind, though it's probably only one possibility.
No, the idea is you use stolen credit cards to buy your own game, then you get the money from the credit cards to yourself perhaps easier than other ways. I'm not sure.
Heh, consider yourself lucky, in Costa Rica you can't even buy from the Android Market, or Amazon mp3 store. Hell, I had to use a US vpn just to be able to buy my phone.
I know it's probably a negligible piece of market share but it sucks to feel excluded.
There are also legal ramifications when doing business in a new country.
They (Google, in this case) have to ensure that they are complying with appropriate company/tax/accounting/privacy/etc. laws for each country. This may not be as easy as rubber-stamping some forms, so they have to prioritise countries they are familiar with and are can already do business in.
Google hasn't even managed to accept Canadian developers into the Android marketplace, despite having multiple operations there - they either aren't trying very hard, or they are just really, astonishingly bad at this stuff.
I think the problem is when cross border fraud happens, the complexity and cost for detective work is higher than domestic fraud. Also in case of regular refund for customers, it is much easier for Market institution to deduct fund from domestic sellers' accounts. While cross border market has to deal with tax, exchange rate and different countries law regarding for refund.
As developer friendly Google generally is, i find this kind of attitude very annoying. The fact that the android marketplace is closed to lots of countries even two years (!!) after launch certainly tames any optimistic posture one might take regarding Google's attitude towards rest of the world developers.
How possible/easy it is for someone in the EU to register a company in the US (with a US bank account) without being a US resident?
EDIT: A cursory search on google indicates it's possible, but it seems like a field rife with scams. Any advice from someone who has done it before would be highly appreciated.
Its interesting to see that when talking about Sunspider benchmark, he specifically pointed out that IE9 preview performs a lot better than IE8 that was shown on the benchmark and even complemented the IE team for doing a good job.
Things like this is why its easy to dislike MSFT and trust Google (despite privacy concerns). I have said this before and I will say it again, IE can be the fastest, most standard compliant and most secure browser out there and I would still not use it.
Looks nigh-identical to a talk they gave, what? A few months / a year ago?
I think NaCl is the single biggest part of all this. As I said in another comment here:
I see NaCl as the only actual reason why things will move to being almost totally web-based, and a damn good one at that. It's the ultimate merger of both worlds, and you can (and they do / will) sandbox every application (something I've wanted since I started looking into computers at all). Easy installing + easy purchasing + easy updates + performance = win.
We are in an interesting junction point for browser games: will the future be HTML5 based games or will all browsers start to offer sandbox that will run native games like Chrome does.
Basically, will current AAA game industry shift to use HTML5 or will browser makers be eager enough to get AAA titles to their platform that they will offer native clients in browsers.
I think we will see flash games continue to spread, because it's a very good platform for games.
I think we will see a lot more of HTML5 games. Time is needed so JavaScript engines still enhance a bit, as well as browser's rendering engines. Everything else will be palliated by libraries providing a good game development environment for games in JavaScript.
For the moment flash has an enormous edge, but i don't see anything preventing canvas+JavaScript to become a very good platform for gaming in the next 3 or 4 years. Whether it will be used or not is another question.
On the other hand i don't see Native Client having a big success. I could very well be wrong about that, and it's really just a feeling, since with proper ecosystem and integration, it could become a lot better than flash for web game development.
I'm pretty sure the current AAA game industry isn't going to move into the browser. Not everything needs to happen inside the browser. If the browser really does take over the whole computer, like many are predicting, the game industry will probably abandon the general-purpose computer entirely and stick to the (more profitable) consoles.
I don't understand the downvoting on this, but I'll elaborate.
Computer gaming was already a high-end, enthusiast market before the whole phone/tablet thing started. Going forward, it's only going to become more of a niche as the desktop computer becomes strictly a work machine.
Casual entertainment is now delivered through convenient gadgets that work where you are comfortable, instead of chaining you to a desk. Anybody who has some of these gadgets knows that this is the way it must be, and soon that will be everybody.
The technology stack Google is talking about here is nowhere close to being viable for games on gadgets. And the gadgets already have fully realized commercial gaming platforms anyway, that are always going to be way ahead of the web stack.
There is just no reason to make games for the Chrome App Store. Productivity apps are a whole other matter. But games, no.
> Computer gaming was already a high-end, enthusiast market before the whole phone/tablet thing started.
I'm not sure what you mean by "computer gaming" but if you mean graphic intensive games, I don't think that's what Google is aiming at (at least, not as a priority). Google is aiming at social addictive games that millions of normal people (not hardcore gamers) play, such as farmville and co. Google has already bought/invested in 5 social gaming companies and those are doing great on the "computer gaming" market.
It works in theory. In practice, compiling your web app for multiple CPU targets is likely to be yet another complexity for the app developer and a drag on the platform as it tries to keep up with native apps.
I don't see how they are going to get it on any other gadget platform besides Android, in which case there is no real advantage for the developer over a native Android app.
Honestly, I see NaCl as the only actual reason why things will move to being almost totally web-based, and a damn good one at that. It's the ultimate merger of both worlds, and you can (and they do / will) sandbox every application (something I've wanted since I started looking into computers at all). Easy installing + easy purchasing + easy updates + performance = win.
I dont understand fully the point of this web store from a consumer stand point. If i can go play the same game at www.x.com what is the advantage of buying the same game in the Chrome store?
I assume that this web store will launch simultaneously with Google's Chrome OS, where it will make lots of sense for you to use their store to browse for games, apps, themes, and everything else.
It also seems that we're moving to a place where people are happy to pay $0.50 for a game if they know that paying means the developer will make more. Better to use the official app store on your new Google computer and pay small amounts for the apps you like than the old way of not being able to find a Flash game hidden among a page of Flash ads.
Centralized so you don't have to go to multiple places to get your gaming fix (if you like a lot of games rather than just a couple), gamesaves and badges/achievements are centrally located and saved in the cloud for gaming anywhere and on any platform, no downloads, consistent UI, more games to browse = better discovery of new games.
I'm guessing this service will also have a both a friend list (connected via facebook, twitter or whatever) and/or a lounge or lobby where gamers can make/meet friends and start-up a group game, or just chat in general. Can't really get a critical mass of these at individual game sites.
"USD only for App developers, WWW for buyers"
I translate it to myself:
"west: place with creative smart people. rest: dumb idiot consumers"
This is what always happen with 'gaming marketplaces', and 'mobile marketplaces'. This is the case with XNA, X-Box Live, android market etc... As someone from Hungary (Eastern Europe) I was naive enough to get excited about some of these in the past. I no longer do that. My first task is to check for this 'west-rest' rule. If I smell this I avoid the stuff like plague.
Maybe a good startup idea for someone who is reading this: create non-protectionist gaming marketplaces? I think there would be huge demand for that.