Turn Based Multiplayer

Google recently announced that they have added turn based multiplayer capabilities to the Google Games service and that these capabilities would soon be available on iOS as well.  While I think it is great to see Google offering these capabilities, I do have some concerns.  The biggest concern is that players who want to play on line will need to have Google+ accounts.  That in itself is not a big concern, since if you have a gmail account, you have a Google+ account.  The concern is that in order to play with friends, they'll have to be part of your Google+ circles.  For me personally, I'm not interested in adding another social media platform to my life and I'm worried this may be a barrier for players of my games and turn based multiplayer in general.  Another issue is that the google services really only support traditional turn based gameplay which involves each player taking their turn in sequence.  While this works fine for Droid Tower, may existing board and card games have gameplay that involves players interacting with each other out of turn.  A great example is the card game Munchkin, which allows players to work with or against other players out of turn.  Bringing these types of experiences into the mobile space could be very difficult with the current Google Games services.

For some time now and prior to the announcement of any Google Games services, I've been working on an open source turn based multiplayer framework called plAsync that would support cross platform play on Android, iOS, and Facebook.  I took this on because I needed it for the eventual Droid Tower online, and also because I was disappointed with the current paid services to support this.  I wanted to give developers open source tools that they could use to craft a turn based multiplayer experience without being tied to a particular paid service.  I wanted to give developers the freedom to choose how they support this in the cloud and how and if they need to monetize their app to support the cloud service costs.  While the existence of the Google Games turn based services has offered up additional possibilities for developers to support online features in their turn based games, I don't feel that it in any way diminishes the need for plAsync.  My hope is that it will become a community owned completely neutral alternative to the services offered by Google, Apple, and third parties.

Google Games services does have one huge advantage over plAsync, however.  It is currently free.  A developer using plAsync would have to deploy the software on their favorite cloud service and while they could support a limited number of users using the free initial offerings many of these services provide, if their user base grew substantially, they would have to pay usage fees and would have to monetize their app to support paying those costs.  That means that either devs would have to charge for or incorporate ads or microtransactions in an app they planned to offer completely for free, or that they potentially would receive less revenue from an app that they had already planned to monetize.  However, if Google+ is the barrier I think it is, the trade off is potentially some users will be turned off by the Google+ requirement and the end result will be less users generating revenue.  I'm betting that for developers having and giving users choice trumps the free services offered by Google+.

What do you think?  If you are a developer, what do you think of Google Games services?  If you are a user, is the Google+ requirement a concern or a turn off for you?  Please leave comments and let me know your thoughts.

For any developer's I'd love for you to participate in plAsync either by contributing to the project or being a beta tester for the framework.  Please visit the site and get involved if you are interested.