A year ago I predicted that Google will start making investments in the online gaming market - (Google Games). Now it appears that they have done just that. A report on Tech Crunch website claims that Google has invested over $100 million in a company called Zygna which is a social gaming network (the makers of Facebook games like Farmville and Mafia Wars). Other sources claim the silent investment is somewhere between $100 million and $200 million.

Online gaming is a trend that is on the increase, many flash based games are now better quality than the games you used to be able to buy in the shops a few years back, and more and more people are using flash games websites for casual gaming. It makes sense that Google Games would take advantage of this trend.

The implications for Paypal are not good though, since Zygna is currently Paypals largest online customer, and with Google getting in on the action, its very likely that Zygna will have to change over to using Google Checkout. There might have to be some clause in the contract to continue using paypal (which people are more comfortable with anyway) than google checkout.

I tried a couple of urls to see if Google are using them yet, but neither http://games.google.com or http://google.com/games currently work. This might change by the end of the year.

Hopefully Google won't try to force people to use the Google Buzz network to access the Google Games, but rather have a more open and flexible system, possibly integrating the games into the google search results, (like when they had the pacman game on the google logo last month), or maybe a simple registration optional system like www.kongregate.com.