This article was published on May 3, 2018

Google is entering the gaming business, starting with a trivia app


Google is entering the gaming business, starting with a trivia app Image by: jackinboxs / Pixabay

Bloomberg reports that Google is launching a social gaming startup called Arcade, with plans to build a quiz title as its first release.

The plan is to grow the company over at Area 120, a division that fosters employees’ experimental ideas and brings them to market. At its helm is 21-year-old Michael Sayman, who was Facebook’s youngest engineer at age 18 a few years ago.

It’s only fitting, given Arcade’s focus on ‘mobile gaming with friends,’ and Sayman’s background in developing the popular multiplayer iOS word game, 4 Snaps. He’s also the brain behind Lifestage, a Snapchat-style app from Facebook designed for high schoolers to share photos and videos of themselves and connect with classmates. After launching it in 2016, Facebook killed it off almost exactly a year later.

Area 120 has previously launched Grasshopper, an app for learning the basics of coding on your phone, as well as Uptime, which lets you watch YouTube videos in sync with friends elsewhere in the world. It’ll be interesting to see what sort of games make the cut there, especially with fresh talent calling the shots, and with other quiz apps like HQ hogging the spotlight.

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