Here Come the Google Glass Videogames (Video)
Games are a rapidly growing category on Android, with the top 200 games on Google Play grossing some $12 million per day worldwide, according to Distimo. — Now, here come the inevitable games for one of Google's much more niche projects, the Google Glass smart glasses.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google has been widening Glass's funnel step by step: it opened the device to any developer willing to pay in November 2013, the first third-party apps landed on the Explorer edition back in May 2013, and just this week Google confirmed prescription-lens support for the Explorer edition. Games are the next layer of that stack.
The timing tracks the money on the parent platform — Distimo puts the top 200 Google Play games at roughly $12 million in daily worldwide revenue, which is exactly the economic argument for porting game concepts onto a head-mounted display. That said, augmented-reality specialists flagged serious usability hurdles for Glass as far back as April 2012, and those constraints now fall on game designers directly.
First-order effects
- Glass Explorer owners get a new app category to justify the headset's $1,500 developer price, giving Google its first real usage signal for whether hands-free, glance-based play works at all.
- Android game studios gain a second distribution surface inside Google's ecosystem, with the same Play-style economics Distimo measures on phones now theoretically applicable to a wearable.
Second-order effects
- Rivals in wearables face pressure to match a games catalog before their own devices ship, since a dead app library was already the standard knock against smart glasses among early reviewers.
- Game designers must rework interaction models around voice, touch-strip, and head movement — input methods that could migrate to other head-worn hardware if they prove out on Glass.
Third-order effects
- If glance-based games find even a niche audience, wearables stop being phone accessories and become their own content platform, with discovery and monetization rules written by whoever ships the first hits.
- The experiment doubles as a low-cost R&D program for Google's broader interest in heads-up computing, feeding lessons into whatever augmented-reality hardware follows the Explorer program.
The trend: Mobile gaming's proven revenue engine is being extended onto head-worn displays, with Google using Glass as the testbed for whether play works without a screen in hand.