A year later, Microsoft is hoping a large lineup of games — 75 in all – will fuel a repeat performance.

And, if more sports and dance games won’t work, then it’s also integrating the speech- and motion-controlled Kinect capabilities into all aspects of the Xbox to seal the deal.

“It’s not just something for videogames. It’s something that will have a fundamental change in how people interact with technology,” said David Dennis, group product manager of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business.

Dennis declined to provide an update on how many Kinect sensors the company has sold since last season. To be sure, it has a long way to go to a majority of owners having it.

More than 55 million of the latest Xboxes have been sold to date, compared to the 10 million sensors sold, based on last year’s sales figures.

But he said the 75 new Kinect games available for the Xbox coming out this holiday are four times the number of games that came out for the launch last year.

Sony’s PlayStation Move, which it says has sold eight million devices, expects to launch a third of the titles, or 26, between September and December this year.

Tony Key, SVP of Sales & Marketing at Ubisoft, says its company has a dozen games, especially made for the Kinect, coming out this holiday.

“We are big believers and we’ve had a lot of success on it. We are going to continue to invest in the space, and it’s a great way to broaden the market,” he said. “Motion-controlled this year will sell more than last year. Kinect has a bright future. We have more Kinect games and a higher forecast on Kinect games.”

The range of games has expanded vastly beyond the dance, fitness and sports genres that launched last year. However, in general, the games still tend to still be more family-friendly and casual and aren’t meant for the hardcore demographic.

“It was about breaking down the barriers and making it easier to play. The games we launched with fundamentally and absolutely exploited the magic of Kinect,” Dennis said.

But that’s slowly changing. For example, some of Ubisoft’s titles — such as Just Dance 3, Just Dance Kids 2 and Your Shape Fitness Evolved — follow the status quo, but the publisher is bringing Kinect aspects to all future Tom Clancy games, including Ghost Recon Future Soldier, which comes out early next year.

In the game, players use hand gestures to customize weapons and voice controls to choose different attachments.

Dennis said there are many more examples of games that have Kinect features that aren’t necessarily Kinect-only games.

For instance, in Forza Motorsport 4, a racing game, players can look to their left to see a competitor’s car out the driver’s side window. Electronic Art’s Mass Effect 3, coming out next year, will allow players during battle to use voice controls to talk to their squad mates, including something like, “take cover on the left!”

More broadly, Kinect is also being integrated into all aspects of entertainment on the Xbox, including the ability to use Bing to search the music, games and video catalog on Xbox Live, or control Netflix.

In Xbox’s latest Kinect commercial it illustrates how Kinect has everything to do with it being a replacement for a remote control, and never even shows anyone playing a game.

Here’s a video showing off Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon’s GunSmith feature:

Yesterday, it hinted that it will share its plans for leveraging Facebook’s new HTML5 mobile platform, but that there are other surprises to come. The event is titled “Unleashed,” so expect a lot of talk about where the company is headed with mobile in general.

Stay tuned at 10 am PT to hear the latest from the mega-successful social games company, which is currently seeking to raise $1 billion in an initial public offering.

9:57 am: Just showed up, expect the show to kick off any minute.

The press conference is taking place in Zynga’s new headquarters. In the atrium, there’s a big stage set up, and the press gallery is sitting in a bunch of retro chairs. Feels a little bit like an MTV talk show.

Zynga invited my dog, Fletch, to come play at the event, but he doesn’t have a travel budget, so he had to stay home in Seattle.

Pretty fitting that Zynga’s office, a.k.a. “the dog house,” has a hot dog stand. As you may know, the company was named after the dog, Zinga, owned by founder Mark Pincus.

10:10 am: The event may be starting. We are watching an infomercial on how Zynga was able to contribute to Haiti relief after the earthquake.

10:25 am: Ok, while we waited to get things started I was able to go get a Blue Bottle cup of coffee that takes five minutes to drip into the cup. What a perk!

Someone is getting excited. Just heard my first barking dog.

10:35 am: Here we go. There’s a montage of games from Poker to CityVille and Adventure World, Words With Friends and FarmVille. You’ve probably played one of them.

10:37 am: Founder and CEO Mark Pincus has taken the stage.

This is the first media event of any kind we have done in our new building, he says.

He jokes that they are about games, and we should feel comfortable being loud today.

He said they are launching 10 new products today, all of which have been in development for a year. Today we will meet the people and faces behind the innovation.

Pincus: There are 1,700 Zynga employees in this building alone, and at some point they will come out and say hi to us.

Pincus: He wants to know how he can get “you guys” to play games. We are all busy, and how can he get us all to play.

For us, it’s a platform. We aren’t the company that will make the next hit game, we are trying to do something broader than that. We want this experience to make up a platform for play.

10:44 am: Pincus says they spend a lot of time on the “FTUE,” or the “first time user experience.”

We want to give you a five to 15 minute experience that feels like a meal, we don’t try to ask you to change your day. Just like a good show, and I’ve been addicted to “Breaking Bad,” if you do like our games, we hope to give you enough depth for you to invest three, six months or a year.

We are going to show off Zynga Direct, whether on the Web or mobile, we are going to build a whole sandbox around the games and not just in the games. Facebook is here today and we are excited to be their launch partner for their platform announced yesterday. We’ll be showing off three HTML5 games that will be part of that.

When we unveil the pieces of Zynga Direct, we hope that you see that it is the deepest Facebook Connect experience on the Web today.

10:48 am: We are showing you CastleVille today, which is the next Ville game in our franchise. That game has been in development for more than a year, and it has beautiful art. It has new ways to collaborate and get ahead by partnering with other players in the game.

We are going to show you a new casual games category today in the hidden objects genre.

David Ko, Zynga’s chief mobile officer, will be showing a number of mobile titles launching in the next few weeks.

10:51 am: Pincus is now handing over the stage to Cadir Lee, CTO, who is in charge of building out so much of the technology in the back-end.

10:52 am: Lee: The first thing I want to talk about is our gaming engine, which has been built from scratch on Adobe’s Flash 11.

We have our own private cloud called “Z Cloud,” which is focused on being able to play our games all of the time no matter if it’s Christmas Eve. We’ve been known to deploy a 1,000 servers in one week in order to support a new game.

This isn’t the sexy stuff, but Zynga’s cloud and gaming engine technology is key. Often, the company is considered an analytics-driven company, rather than a gaming company. Lee is touching on some of this now.

Lee: We’ve long been known as an analytics company, which shows how our players engage. How do we match people up, so that you can have a social experience with a person across the street or around the world. How do we connect you with the right person at the right time.

Roy Sehgal, VP and GM, is now on stage to unveil a new genre, called “hidden objects.” It’s one that Disney’s Playdom has developed through a game called Gardens of Time.

Zynga says its first game is called Hidden Chronicles.

The concept behind hidden objects is finding clues hidden in a room, sort of like looking for Waldo. They are right in front of you, but difficult to find.

Up until Playdom’s release, critics didn’t believe that the popular PC download category could be made into a social game.

Sehgal: It’s going to be social. It’s going to be extremely easy to learn, but hard to master.

10:58 am: You can play with your friends to see who can find the most hidden objects, or provide hints to your friends.

This game is extremely interactive. No matter how many times you play an individual scene, it will be fresh. I believe it will be one of the most beautiful games you will play.

On the screen, Sehgal is showing various scenes that take place on a train, underwater or in the outdoors. The art is rich and historic-looking.

11:00 am: Now there’s a demo of the new Mafia Wars 2, which just launched yesterday, and is promising to be a much richer experience than the original version that came out three-plus years ago.

Since it’s already out, feel free to check it out on Facebook. No need to read a description here.

11:06 am: Mafia Wars 2 is also now live on Google+, which is the company’s second game on the platform after Poker. Remember, Google has a substantial stake in Zynga.

11:07 am: There’s an update to Zynga’s Poker game next. It was launched in July 2007, and after four years, we are still the largest and most social Poker game.

Zynga is unveiling Zynga Casino, including Zynga Bingo.

Casino games has been identified as one of the leading categories on Facebook with others experiencing lots of success, including DoubleDown Casino.

Zynga Bingo will be launching soon.

11:10 am: Bill Jackson, Creative Director, is now on stage. He’s from the company’s Dallas studios, and he says they developed the latest in the Ville franchise, called CastleVille.

The other Villes in the franchise are FarmVille, FrontierVille, CityVille and now CastleVille.

Jackson: It’s a new level of social, and offers the best of all the Ville games have to offer.

The game has a whole new cast of characters, who look like they are from Shrek, complete with rugged heros and refined ladies who fall in love.

Jackson: CastleVille takes storytelling to a whole new level, and in a personal way. Your journey through the game is different based on who you are.

Zynga is bringing massively mutliplayer role-playing games to the mass market.

CastleVille will have music from an entire orchestra that was recorded in Seattle. Jackson says this is the first time this has been done in a social game, although it is common in console games.

11:18 am: The peanut gallery has been asked to turn around to see all of the Zynga employees — or at least half of them — that have gathered around the balconies of the atrium.

Pincus: We just wanted you to see a few more faces.

Pincus is now introducing John Schappert, who recently joined Zynga as COO from Electronic Arts. He has taken over running all of our games, leaving Pincus to be more entrepreneurial.

11:22 am: Schappert: We are building every kind of play for everyone, everywhere.

We are building on iOS, Facebook, Android, Google+ and Tencent in China.

Helping us deliver on play anytime, anywhere, is David Ko, chief mobile officer.

Ko has an update on Zynga’s mobile plans, which have not been as aggressive as others have been in the space so far.

Ko: We’ve always felt that we need to be the best content creators out there, regardless of what platform.

It’s my pleasure to not talk to you about one or two new games, but five new games launching shortly. It is around Facebook’s HTML5 platform announced yesterday.

The first two are Words With Friends and Poker, and the third is FarmVille. All three games will be available tomorrow.

Another new game is Mafia ShakeDown. You’ll be able to request missions and have the opportunity to be the next “Don.” This game will be coming soon, so stay tuned.

The last game is called DreamZoo, which is Zynga’s first game in the zoo genre.

In a short video, Zynga shows off DreamZoo. You can collect animal varieties and feed and clean your animals.

11:29 am: Schappert is back on stage. He says they have over 60 million daily active users, and they play games over two million minutes everyday.

He is unveiling something called Project Z, which is a Facebook Connect enabled platform. It allows you to play in an environment that’s tailored just for games.

In a sneak peak, a video says players are able to chat, share and form instant communities worldwide.

Schappert: It’s a social gaming playground. You can start a game on Project Z and then continue on Facebook and vice versa. It’s not launching today, but people can start creating a gamer tag starting worldwide today.

11:32 am: Pincus is back on stage to wrap up the presentation:

We really want to build a platform for play. We haven’t changed our vision since starting. We want to be the biggest macro bet on social gaming. We believe in social gaming. We believe that everyone around the world will embrace play, so everything we are doing is an attempt to bring that to life.

We know it’s early and it’s primitive, we know so much of game play and social-ness is early, and over the next few years it’s going to be so much more. It’s going to be mobile. There’s going to be a World of Warcraft feeling, but something you can understand in five minutes.

11:35 am: OK, that’s it folks. Formal presentation is over.

In summary, before today, there were a few niches that Zynga had not yet entered. That left opportunities for competitors to do well on Facebook. With Zynga’s 10 announcements today, including a number of new mobile and social games, the gaps have narrowed significantly.

Zynga has expanded into new genres, like hidden objects and more broadly into casino, and has five new games on mobile. It is also launching its all-new standalone online game network separate from Facebook that goes direct to consumers.

If Zynga was looking for a big bang before its IPO, this might have been it.

Thanks for reading — more coverage and analysis coming shortly.

In an interview in Silicon Valley, Brad Serwin, the COO of Playdom’s social games unit, said the company has finally started to come out of hiding after being acquired for $563.2 million, plus a $200 million earn-out, more than a year ago.

One reason it took so long, according to Serwin: The general pains of integrating a small company into a larger organization.

Since the acquisition, Playdom has moved to new offices in Palo Alto, Calif., which it shares with Disney Mobile (which was formed through the acquisition of another Silicon Valley start-up, Tapulous).

Both have been learning to work with a parent company that is headquartered 350 miles away.

“A year after the acquisition, we are successfully transitioning into an operating division within Disney,” Serwin said. “We are 100 percent back to work.”

It took long enough, especially given the radical change the industry has undergone since Facebook launched its third-party application platform in May 2007. [More on how the industry has changed  in an interview today with Rick Thompson, a founder of Playdom.]

Since then, games have become the most popular applications on the platform, and have evolved from simple and inexpensive time killers to graphically rich applications.

Facebook has changed the rules, too.

This has impacted everyone in the space, not just three-year-old Playdom. Two of the biggest challenges emerged when the social network shut down its viral channels: When it became difficult to acquire new users by posting messages on users’ pages, and when Facebook implemented Credits, a virtual currency that requires developers to cut Facebook 30 percent of all revenues.

Playdom execs believe the company has finally reorganized, and are planning on making a big splash in what many worried was a dead pool.

Of the dozen titles slated for the next year, two games will come as soon as this month, and up to three games — coming in January, March and August — will leverage Disney brands.

Playdom’s next game is called Secret Agent X. For now, it is only available in beta in some international markets, but it is coming to the U.S. in the fall. In the game, a player leads a dual life as an average citizen who at night becomes a secret agent, exploring new locations and completing missions with the help of high-tech gadgets.

In the trailer for the game, seen below, a suburban housewife manages to save the world, all the while keeping her cover by making sure dinner is on the table on time.

As the seventh-largest app maker, according to AppData, Playdom falls below Zynga, Electronic Arts and even such new entrants as Germany’s Wooga.

That said, Playdom’s recent launch of Gardens of Time was considered a breakthrough hit that used game mechanics rarely seen on Facebook. The social game falls into the category of “hidden objects,” where players try to find a list of items in a room, similar to “Where’s Waldo?”

The concept behind hidden objects is not new to gaming, but it is new to Facebook, and was recently identified as a niche worth pursuing. Today, Playdom’s game is garnering nearly three million daily active users, which registers slightly below Zynga’s new Adventure World.

Playdom hopes it will prosper by bringing new concepts to social gaming and also by leveraging Disney’s big brands to catch players’ attention.

As a recent test, Playdom renamed its game GnomeTown as Disney’s GnomeTown. Serwin said the game performed much better with the new name.

Playdom’s close competitor Playfish is also relying on the intellectual property of its parent company, Electronic Arts. It has seen its Sims Social title climb the charts to become the second-most-popular game.

On the other hand, Zynga, which is the largest social games maker, has made up all of its own properties, ranging from FarmVille to its newest property, Adventure World. More recently, it has used name-brand promotions within its games to garner attention, such as Lady Gaga in FarmVille, and more recently, Enrique Iglesias in CityVille.

“Competitors have chunks of IP, but we have a lot to choose from,” said Serwin, adding that it’s not as if Playdom alone needs intellectual property: “Everyone needs IP.”

Serwin said the Playdom division’s plan is to work closely with Disney; it has hired a liaison who works in Burbank every day to make sure Playdom’s plans are on course with what Disney has in mind.

Still, Serwin can’t deny that the lull in game making has dragged down the results of Disney’s Interactive Group. Disney reported $21 million in accounting adjustment in the third quarter and $34 million in the second quarter tied to Playdom alone, and the losses are expected to continue.

In the second-quarter earnings call, President and CEO Bob Iger tried to explain its multimillion dollar charges to analysts:

“We thought it would be wise to improve the quality of the games that we’re going to release. So, we took a five-month hiatus, which had not been planned, from releasing games, to build a higher-quality game, and then also to re-stack our technical capabilities to deal with volume or to deal with scale, which we are hoping to achieve.”

Iger declined to say when the group would hit break-even, but that it was expected to get into the black by 2013.

Iger gave Gardens of Time as an example of a game that is monetizing well. “We feel good about the direction of Playdom, particularly with this new hit game in the marketplace,” he said, adding that new games in the pipeline will be based on Disney, ESPN and Marvel brands.

It has taken more than a year, but Serwin believes Playdom is ready.

“We’ve made a connection with people at Disney to get it done,” he said. “Whether it should have happened faster or slower, I don’t know, but it’s happening and it’s great.”

Now other mobile games are trying to replicate the moneymaking branding model.

ZeptoLab’s Cut the Rope will soon start selling plush toys based on its main character, Om Nom, a lovable critter that likes to eat candy; Disney is also getting into the merchandising game, debuting its first original mobile game character, with hopes that it will become a pop culture phenomena like Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck.

The Cut the Rope toys, which aren’t yet available, are initially being used to promote the company’s Facebook page, by giving away toys to increase the number of “likes.”

Last week, Disney released the mobile game Where’s My Water?, which introduces the alligator character Swampy.

Similar to Cut the Rope, the game challenges users to guide water to Swampy’s bathtub by tunneling passageways through the dirt (in Cut the Rope, players snip pieces of rope to guide candy into Om Nom’s mouth). The character has a lot of personality: Tickle him once and he smiles; tickle him one too many times, and he growls.

Where’s My Water? is designed to appeal to consumers of all ages, unlike many of the entertainment company’s other brands, which are primarily kid-focused.

Disney Mobile’s General Manager Bart Decrem — who joined the game studio through the acquisition of his start-up, Tapulous — said, “I want to build a character and send it into pop culture.”

If Swampy does well — and so far, Where’s My Water? has done exceedingly well, unseating Rovio’s Angry Birds as the No. 1 paid app on iTunes on Friday — we could see Swampy in three-dimensional plush form, or on the big screen.

“He has to prove himself, and if people want to know more, then we’ll do YouTube movie originals,” Decrem said. “Our goal is to build great characters and great games.”

But never fear, better times await. The next four months will generate more than half of the industry’s sales that are made at retail, which could be more than enough to bring things back in line with last year’s performance.

The NPD Group today released its assessment of retail sales in August, which does not take into consideration electronic or other digital channels where games are sold.

NPD analyst Anita Frazier said almost everything related to games — software, hardware and accessories — declined in August, compared to the same month a year earlier. The one exception was portable game sales, which were driven by sales of Nintendo DS and 3DS software.

Price cuts benefited both Nintendo and Sony.

Sony trimmed the price of the five-year-old PlayStation 3 to $250 from a previously recommended price of $300, while Nintendo slashed the price of the struggling 3DS by $80, after the glasses-free 3-D handheld device had been on sale for only four months.

Nintendo said about 185,000 units were sold after the price reduction on Aug. 12, an increase of more than 260 percent during the comparable 19-day time period in July. During the entire month, the company sold 235,000 3DS game devices to outsell the original Nintendo DS, which still managed to sell 165,000 in August.

The PS3 price cut also allowed it to drive a notable uptick in sales year over year.

Xbox continues to maintain its lead over other consoles in the market, selling 308,000 units in August, which means it has outsold any other console maker for 14 of the past 15 months in the U.S.

In August, total U.S. game sales from retail, including all hardware and software, was $669.9 million, falling 23 percent from $873.8 million a year ago. Software sales in the period were hit the hardest, recording a 34 percent drop to $264.8 million from $403.5 million a year earlier.

Frazier attributed the bulk of the decline to Electronic Arts shifting the release of its latest Madden football title from August to September. The game launched on Aug. 30, which falls within NPD’s September 2011 reporting period.

Otherwise, the best-selling game in August was Square Enix’s Deus Ex, followed by EA’s NCAA Football 12 and Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Frazier added that the rest of the year could more than make up for the softness seen in 2011.

“Even though year-to-date performance of the new physical portion of the industry is down 5 percent, more than half of industry sales in this channel are still to be realized in the back four months of the year,” she wrote. “Given the strong release schedule in the coming months, new physical retail sales could still be flat to slightly up once full-year sales are tallied.”

Metamorphic Ventures led the round, joined by Steve Schoettler, a Zynga vice president who was one of the gaming company’s founding members.

IndieGoGo’s model seems to be directly parallel to the one championed by Kickstarter, the very buzzy crowdfunding site that has raised about $10 million itself. But presumably there’s room for more than one of these funding sites — the Web is a very big place.

If you do want to compare and contrast: IndieGoGo, founded in 2008, says its users have “raised millions of dollars” for 40,000 campaigns. Earlier this summer, Kickstarter said its users had contributed $60 million to 10,000 successful projects over its three-year life.

This one, based on the crazily addictive and popular Portal games, is great. It’s also free, and short — a mere seven minutes long. And really, the last 90 seconds are credits, so you can knock this out very quickly.

“Portal: No Escape” comes to us via director Dan Trachtenberg, whose resume to date seems to consist primarily of commercials and some hosting work at Revision3 video podcasts; note that Diggnation co-host Alex Albrecht is billed as one of the guards.

This looks like it went up on YouTube just a day ago, and it’s getting very popular, very quickly.

Love to know the backstory on this one — it’s clearly not something Trachtenberg put together on a whim, but there’s no indication that there’s a formal tie-in with Valve here.

The shaky results led the retailer’s shares to drop nearly seven percent in morning trading, but by the end of the day the stock had completely recovered, closing at $21.43, up 97 cents a share.

Why?

GameStop president Tony Bartel said the quarter was expected to be weak, due to poor hardware sales and a lack of major game releases. But he noted that there are several reasons to be excited about the second half of the year.

“As anticipated and forecasted, we knew the market was going to be softer than most anticipated, and sales were going to be down,” he said. “And at the same time, we are investing four cents of every quarter for strategic initiatives.”

Still, the company hit its guidance and exceeded most analysts’ expectations by earning $30.9 million, or 22 cents a share, on revenue of $1.74 billion. On average, analysts were estimating earnings of 21 cents a share on revenue of $1.81 billion, according to FactSet.

Here are three reasons for Bartel’s optimism: 

Price drops: Game hardware fell 16 percent in the second quarter, according to NPD Group, led by weak sales of Nintendo’s struggling 3DS and Sony’s PlayStation 3. Since then, both Sony and Nintendo have cut the price of those devices, which has already helped accelerate sales.

Presales: Bartel said there was a 30 percent reduction in titles being released in the second quarter compared to last year, but the pipeline of titles is very strong for the rest of the year. So far, GameStop has, over the next two quarters, more titles with a million-plus reservations than it has ever had. No word on which titles those are, but Bartel was willing to list some of the games he is “excited” about: Gears of War 3, Battlefield 3, Uncharted 3, Batman: Arkham City, Elder Scrolls and Assassin’s Creed, among others.

Digital revenues: GameStop is still on track to hit $450 million in digital revenues this year, which represents a 50 percent bump over 2010. In the second quarter it reported digital sales growth of 69 percent, and some of its latest digital initiatives haven’t even launched yet. Bartel said a survey found that 50 percent of customers who bought downloadable content at a GameStop store were buying it for the first time, and that they often paid in cash or with gift cards.

Facebook has launched a major redesign for games, bringing back some viral components that were turned off after users complained about random alerts cluttering their news feeds.

The updates were announced Thursday evening, just hours after Google unveiled its games network that offers game makers a larger cut of the revenues than Facebook does.

Facebook’s new features will likely be favorable to developers, who are constantly looking for new ways to get players to discover their games, but it’s questionable how the social network’s audience will react.

It’s been more than a year since Facebook shut off developers’ ability to post messages to people’s walls — messages that asked friends to help look for their lost cow or plow their crops. When users complained, Facebook cracked down significantly, which made it much more difficult for developers to find new players for their games.

Meanwhile, Google announced today that it is trying hard to contain all game activities to a particular tab under a user’s profile to steer clear of ever being accused of spamming a person’s communication flow.

Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product for Google+, told me that there’s a name for unwanted solicitations: Spam.

“We do not want to inundate you with things that are not relevant,” he added.

It seems that Facebook is now looking for some middle ground to give developers another way to find new consumers.

In a blog post, Facebook said its began rolling out a new ranking system with the goal of only surfacing relevant items to friends, including “high quality content from apps.”

Messages will even appear in the feed of a person who doesn’t already use the app.

Apparently some of the responsibility will fall on the users to determine what they end up seeing. For instance, apps that post content which results in high usage will be posted more often; conversely, apps that have content “that is frequently hidden or marked as spam” will be posted less often.

Given that users will have to manually participate in marking alerts, it’s hard to understand how this does not represent a reinstatement of the social network’s old viral channels that people loved to loathe.

Beyond reinstating some viral components, Facebook users will also notice other obvious changes, like a live ticker of real-time game-related updates; bookmarks, where users can select their favorite apps; and leaderboard-type features, where users can post achievements and scores to make game play more competitive.

Another major update will give developers the ability to expand the size of their games so people can expand the game to the full screen of their browser.

In particular, what should be frightening is that Google is attempting to break today’s 30 percent cut that has become standard across both Facebook and Apple.

In a video interview with reporters, Google+ Games Product Manager Punit Soni explained that initially Google will share 95 percent of the revenue from virtual goods sold with the developers and keep only five percent for itself.

That confirms what I originally reported hearing from sources last month.

Soni said it could change in the future, but pricing today will be based on the company’s new in-app payments platform, which charges five percent for microtransactions on the Web (unlike the 30 percent Google charges on Android).

While it’s obvious how this might make Facebook uncomfortable, it should also worry Apple, if there’s enough pressure from developers to shift the standard to something less rich.

Soni also said today that Google is interested in allowing games to be played cross-platform, meaning a person could pause their game on the Web and then pick back up in the same place on their phone.

“There’s nothing to announce today, but it’s something we are looking at,” he added.

Of the 16 games that were released by 10 developers today, one of them was developed in HTML5. The rest were built in Flash. The industry has high hopes for HTML5 unifying both the Web and mobile, by making it possible for software to be written once and run across multiple devices.

If Google+ games could run through the browser on the iPhone or iPad, it could undercut Apple on its own device.

In that scenario, of course, consumers would have to find a compelling reason to switch from playing games that are downloaded through the App Store to playing games through a Google+ experience. Regardless, it should be comforting to developers who are uneasy with the control that either Apple or Facebook has from time to time.

Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product for Google+, also dropped in to the “hangout” session with reporters to give his thoughts on expanding into games.

“We don’t consider ourselves experts at making compelling games, but we can bring a lot to the party,” he said. “There were some internal debates about whether Google was well-suited to have games in our repertoire and what is the value of games to the users. There’s tremendous value for users. They provide a way for people to connect, discover and interact with each other … We don’t see games contrary to our mission, or a diversion. We see them as being core.”