We recently reported that developer Wooga was removing their games from Google+ come July 1. If that wasn’t bad enough news for the already struggling platform, it looks like PopCap is following suit with Bejeweled Blitz: Come June 18, the game will no longer be available on the social network.
We recently reported that developer Wooga was removing their games from Google+ come July 1. If that wasn’t bad enough news for the already struggling platform, it looks like PopCap is following suit with Bejeweled Blitz: Come June 18, the game will no longer be available on the social network.
“Shifting some of our resources from Google+ onto higher-impact efforts was a pretty straightforward decision,” Bejeweled Franchise Director Giordano Contestabile told Inside Social Games. To put it another way, they want to focus more on platforms with a larger audience. When it comes to daily active users on Facebook, Bejeweled Blitz takes 11th place with 2.9 million. It’s a situation that’s very similar to Wooga, as their games are also performing quite well there. With all of that in mind, it’s clear the problem lies with Google+’s inability to gain any traction or build up a user-base that at all rivals that of Facebook’s.
In preparation of the shuttering, PopCap has removed the ability for players to purchase in-game coins, and is encouraging users to spend any coins in their possession as fast as they can. So, if you’re one of those people (judging by this announcement, there aren’t many), go forth, and spend your coins frivolously.
We don’t like to get all doom and gloom here at Gamezebo, but we’re also not ones to ignore obvious trends. Google+ is struggling, and the loss of interested developers will only speed up its decline. That said, Google is a hard company to ever count out. Who knows what steps they’ll take to make the social network relevant again.
