Google+ Games versus Facebook Games: Who Will Win?

After Google announced on Thursday that it will offer 16 games from third party developers on Google+ such as Zynga Poker and the popular Angry Birds game, Facebook retaliated by stating the same day that it would improve gaming experience on its Web site and introduced a new policy loosening restrictions on how developers can market their games on the social network.

Google, who invested previously in Zynga, also said it will roll out the games gradually on Google+, making it available to everyone "soon".

With the two social giants competing to attract more users to their respective online services, the battle of games between them have begun.

"It turns out that people like to play games, and it's core to the social networking use case," Jeremy Liew, a partner at venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, commented on Google's games announcement.

However, Facebook's gaming managers aren’t worried about the competition from Google+. Sean Ryan, director of games partnerships at Facebook, said Friday to reporters at Facebook’s Palo Alto, Calif. offices.

“We don’t worry about them. We worry about us,” Ryan said. He also made an example of McDonald and Starbucks. Several years ago, when McDonald made "bold effort" on coffee, Starbucks “just focused on how to drive its business.”

According to Ryan, Facebook is simply trying to release new innovations for improving game usage and monetization on its platform.

Compared to Facebook's 30% transaction fee to game developers, Google's pitch is to charge game developers only 5% on Google+.

However, revenues is not the main factor for developers, Ryan said. The users will choose the best platform and developers will choose the one with the most users. Ryan specified that 85 games on Facebook have more than 1 million monthly active users.

“At the end of the day, (developers) go where the users are,” Ryan said. “We’re far and away the leader. It’s not even close.”

But who will win between the two Web giants in the future? Leave your comments below.