Google Working On Unified Gaming Platform

Google consolidated its range of services yesterday, taking the Android Market, Google Music, Video, and Books, placing them all under the new Google Play banner. Punit Soni, group product manager for Google+, has said that the company plans to do the same for gaming across its various platforms.Speaking at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Soni is quoted as saying:

By next year, we will not be here talking about Google+ Games, Chrome Web Store games, Games for Native Client and Android games. We will be talking about Google games.

Google's plans then seem to include unifying the various gaming services across Google+, the Chrome store, and Android devices, much like it did yesterday with Google Play. By potentially making games cross-platform compatible, Google open developers up to a much wider audience.

Soni also said that Google would bring some of its existing technologies across its gaming platform, which would include Hangouts, letting players video chat to each other in real time while playing against each other, as well as other features like faster graphics in the Chrome web browser.

Potentially Google's unification could rival companies like Facebook and Zynga, whose tight gaming and social media integration helps generate large amounts of revenue. No exact timeline was quoted for this merge, so we'll have to simply twiddle our thumbs for now until Google decides to make its move.