In a somewhat surprising move today, Mark DeLoura has revealed that he's just stepped down from his gaming evangelist position at Google. DeLoura had just been hired as "developer advocate" back in April, but now he's explained his departure on his personal blog.
He didn't give an exact reason for why he's leaving, however. "This past Monday, I left Google. There are a lot of very interesting things going on at Google right now, and I enjoyed working with many of the people there, but it was not the perfect fit for me," he said. "I’m looking forward to my next adventure."
DeLoura also commented a bit on the future of the industry and the potential for cloud gaming: "For game developers, I’m looking forward to the day where we see more games running in the cloud, like Farmville and World of Warcraft do now, and it is easy for developers to create clients on multiple platforms so I can bring my game with me no matter where I am. As game developers we’ve talked about the idea of making multiple-platform game access simpler for a long time – trans-platform play where the experiences may be different, as opposed to cross-platform play where the experiences are the same – and it should be easier for developers to create clients for web, mobile and desktop without needing to write them in completely different languages or using vastly different SDKs. Microsoft is closest to this with XNA and Silverlight across multiple platforms; Apple’s SDKs across iPhone, iPad and Mac OSX are pretty cleverly designed as well; and Google is approaching it with Android NDK and Chrome Native Client. The increasing use of web services can abstract away a lot of the need for platform-specific SDK features, but there’s still a lot of work to do all around. Games aren’t getting cheaper to make, that’s for sure, and it’s important that technically complex features are still easily available to independent developers working alone."
Google has been making some big moves in the games space, most recently acquiring monetization firm Social Gold. Analysts seem to think that Google's new games focus is a necessary strategy to combat the growing threat of Facebook. We'll be curious to see who they hire to replace DeLoura.
