14 DAY TRIAL // For a while last year, plenty of rumors focused on Google's alleged interest in gaming. The company was supposed to be developing a new platform for social and casual gaming to fight Facebook and perhaps integrate with its social networking plans, also rumored but not materialized yet.
Things died down for a few months, but there is every reason to believe that Google is still working on this.
One sign of things to come, and perhaps a peace offering to the game studios, is the bundling two games from the Chrome Web Store with every fresh Chrome 10 install.
Poppit and Entanglement are now included in the New Tab page, along with any apps you may already have or just with the link to the Web Store if you haven't used it yet.
This isn't anything new, Chrome 10 users noticed it as soon as the new, still in active development, version of Google's web browser became available.
But as Chrome 10 gets closer to a wider release, the beta is coming soon, though it's still a few weeks away, it looks like this the Web Store will get a much bigger exposure than it has so far.
Granted, the Web Store is available to practically all of the browser's well over 120 million users, most of which are running Google Chrome 8 and above, but Google hasn't went all out to promote it. Unless you're following Chrome development, you may not even be aware of it.
Chrome's audience used to be early adopters, more tech savvy than the average, but as it grows, Chrome is becoming increasingly mainstream. And if there's one thing that mainstream web audiences love to do is play games, as Zynga's great successes clearly indicate.
Zynga's CityVille now has 100 million users on Facebook, and Google would love to be a part of something like this. Zynga is looking to expand its reach beyond Facebook as well and is rumored to have partnered with Google, which invested in the company, several months ago.