Google+ Adds Casual Single-Player Games from LabPixies

Google+ Games got a bit bigger recently with the addition of Flood-It! and Sudoku Puzzles, two casual titles from Google’s LabPixies, which was acquired last year.

The two games are unique additions to the platform on account of how solitary they are. Though both Flood-It! and Sudoku Puzzles ask players to invite friends to play, the only actual “social” feature included in the games is a leaderboard displayed below the game. Flood-It! is a puzzle game where players click a series of six colors, trying to “flood” adjacent squares on the board in 25 moves or less. Sudoku Puzzles is a Japanese logic puzzle game where players try to fill in missing numbers inside a grid to achieve a configuration where each column, row, and sub-grids contain all digits from 1 to 9.

While puzzle games haven’t gotten much traction on Facebook without the addition of social features, it could be that the “unobtrusive” route Google+ is taking with Games would make the platform a better home for singleplayer games like Flood-It! and Sudoku. With all Games activity (notifications, requests, etc.) currently confined to the Games tab, players already have to be heading toward the platform to play games, rather than attracted to them by games stories like “So-and-so passed your score on Game X.” If players don’t need to leverage the social graph to find the games — why should the games make use of a player’s social graph at all?

AppData - Facebook application stats and data from Inside Network

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