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PopCap, Wooga Drop Games From Google+

Two major social game developers are pulling their programs from Google+, less than a year after the feature launched.

June 15, 2012

Two major social game developers are pulling out of Google+ after less than a year on the search giant's social network.

Wooga and Electronic Arts-owned PopCap will both pull their titles from Google+, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Wooga has already pulled its Monster World from Google+, while Bubble Island and Diamond Dash will be removed by July 1, Social Games Observer reported. Wooga declined to comment further on the decision.

In August, Berlin-based Wooga broadcast on its blog that three of its social games would be joining Google+ "as a valuable launch partner of Google's step to provide a full social experience for our users."

Six developers worked for three months to make the games, which are designed to allow people to compete with real-life friends, playable for Google+ users, the blog said.

According to gaming-trend tracker, the same three Wooga games regularly perform well on Facebook.

PopCap, meanwhile, will shut down Bejeweled Blitz on Google+ as of Monday, All Things D reported.

EA, the third-largest social game company on Facebook, decided to suspend its game "to redeploy our resources to other adaptations of Bejeweled," a spokesman told PCMag. "Certainly, Google is a valuable gaming partner for PopCap and EA, and we'll continue to develop for Google platforms," he said.

Despite Wooga and EA's decisions to pull their games, Google will still run about 40 games, including Angry Birds, CityVille, and Mafia Wars 2, All Things D said.

Google does not comment on specific games, a spokeswoman said. But the company is "committed to building great gaming experiences for our users," she said, adding that the HTML5 version of Bejeweled is still available in the Chrome Web Store.

According to a May report from analytics firm RJ Metrics, Google has had issues getting users to engage with each other on Google+.

Google to Google+ in Aug. 2011, with titles like Angry Birds and Zynga Poker. The move was viewed as another way in which Google+ could compete with Facebook, which has long seen success on the gaming front. When Facebook announced plans for an IPO in February, for example, it was revealed that of Facebook's 2011 revenue.

In related news, a recent PopCap Games Mobile Gaming Research study reported that the number U.S. Internet users who have played a mobile game in the past month increased 45 percent over last year.

The study found that almost 60 percent of mobile device owners have played a game on either a smartphone or tablet, a 13 percent increase from last year. More than 40 percent of those gamers have played a mobile game in the past month.

Editor's Note: This story was updated at noon Eastern with comment from PopCap.

[Image: Social Games Observer]