Since the launch of Google+ developers, techies and over zealous Google+ lovers have reported seeing material in the source code which lead them to believe games were coming to the infant social platform. as of yesterday, they have arrived.

Recently Google confirmed the addition of games to the network. Vic Gundotra’s official post lovingly declared “With the Google+ project, we want to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to the web. But sharing is about more than just conversations. The experiences we have together are just as important to our relationships. We want to make playing games online just as fun, and just as meaningful, as playing in real life”. Mindful to keep users interacting with Google+ in other areas they added “Games in Google+ are there when you want them and gone when you don’t…If you’re not interested in games, it’s easy to ignore them. Your stream will remain focused on conversations with the people you care about.”

Just hours after the Google released the news, Facebook hit back announcing a plethora of new features for their own games. Their developer blog announced “Today we’re excited to make some of the biggest updates to the apps experience on Facebook since we first launched Platform four years ago. We are launching a major redesign to the Canvas Page to give your app greater real-estate on the user’s browser, and including a live ticker of real-time game related updates to keep the users constantly engaged and updated with their friends’ activity on apps and games as they play.” “…In addition to the automatic stories, we are launching new Graph APIs for achievements and scores so you can publish stories for user’s achievements, passing friends’ scores, or leader board movement to make game play more competitive, social and exciting for your users.”

Personally I am grateful to Google+ for giving me the option not to see games. Frank Reed eloquently echoed my sentiments in his post, saying “…Google must know that there enough folks out there like myself who would rather get a sharp stick in the eye than have one of my friends requesting help getting a virtual animal out of a virtual mess or looking for me to help them fight some evil menace in fantasyland cyberspace.”

As the long fingers of Facebook and Google reach deeper into each other’s pockets we can only speculate on future figures. In a recent post I explained how Facebook may not be suffering from the onset of Google+ quite as badly as you might think. With Google+ gaining well over 20 million users already, could the bubble burst early on Google’s oh-so-successful social media platform?