I often want to play simple games like Pacman, space invader, breakout, tetris or some other random iteration. Sometimes there are non-spammy simple versions of this game but often there aren't. This seems like a pretty cool fix. And if they disappear in the future, who cares?
YouTube started exactly how you described it, some silly thing not meant to be serious and today powers multiple 100M+ businesses using it for content to reach mass audiences.
I read at some point that projects at Google didn't get a greenlight unless there was a reasonable expectation they could be used directly or indirectly by a billion people.
You ain't making sense. Companies need $, and what's wrong with what they do with what they own and can do in this particular case?
My logic is not “don’t make money” but more so pick a lane
They can empower the community and let a PaaS emerge that’s locked in on their APIs for example
For example, did Shopify get into building Marketplaces for E-commerce? No
It isn’t like they would not be able to make money from the gaming industry by being just the layer zero, my beef here is that they’re going one layer up
Whether to empower the company or not via open-source/open-weight etc is based on a company culture, value, and future direction/projection.
And it all depends on the scale.
Google didn't need no HR, no companies normally start with everything in place. AS the companies scale up, they add security team, HR, legal team, etc.
That means more $. Google is 20x the size of Shopify in terms of market cap. Google was loved for their search engines when it was at shopify level initially. REmember decades ago when everyone loved Google search?
This does not mean, Google will keep the same strategies for their direction neither will Shopify. I already hear a lot of complaints from my friends hosting on Shopify on the enshitification.
Anyways, I diregress a bit.
So my point is, at least try to reason about why `hmokiguess` arrived at "Google has too much already and in my opinion they have no business owning a gaming platform". What is too much here in homikiguess's opinion (that is verys subjective, need verification),
You're contradicting yourself, the reasoning for them to have too much was said by you in your own comment, they are 20x the size of Shopify.
Yes. Google does not actually care about search anymore, and the threat that the technology could disappear altogether is real.