I was scanning the news this morning, as I am want to do, and noticed something buried within the web pages that could be a marker of major changes to come in the 'casual' gaming market. Honestly, I'm tired of the whole casual versus hardcore mindsets, but it makes sense in this case, as the developers being approached for a new venture with Google are the minds behind Farmville of Facebook fame, Zynga. 
 
Why does this matter (or I think it matters)? Because Google reaches millions of people everyday, even more than the now ever present Facebook does. The fact that Google dropped an estimated $200 million for Zynga to develop for Google's new "Google Games" service shows me that Google is taking the Farmville fad seriously. While I personally despise Farmville and games like it (not because of it being casual or anything of that nature, I just think it is boring), many others out there in the interwebs do not. 
 
Will Google become a new power-house in the online pick-up-and-play gaming sphere? I would bet my money on it. Hopefully this will breed some better competition from would-be rivals Facebook and MSN Games. I'm interested to see what comes of this personally, what about anybody else? Do people care about this? Would you play "Google Games" if there was free time available? Please respond, I'm interested to hear of people even really care about this or not.