A social network game from a wunderkind developer: what's behind Google's new project

Google is secretly developing a game that should form the basis of the company's new social media project, all of whose social media projects have so far failed. The game is a project of an internal Google startup called Arcade, founded and led by Michael Seiman, a 21-year-old developer who launched his first app at 12 and became a full-time Facebook prodigy at 18.

• The game is scheduled to launch this summer. There are still few details about it, it is known that it will contain elements of a quiz and will not be tied to existing social networks in principle: users will have to register accounts by mobile phone number. Google views the project as an investment in social media, because at some point the game must reach a certain size and become a social network in its own right, Bloomberg notes.
• The elements of the quiz are not accidental – since this year, the HQ Trivia mobile application has rapidly gained popularity in the United States: the service conducts live online quizzes daily with a real presenter who communicates with users. Winners receive real cash prizes. You can read about it in detail here .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOLilAPhC08

• There are no other details about the game. A Google spokeswoman confirmed Arcade's existence to Bloomberg, saying the company specializes in "mobile games with friends," but did not elaborate: "The experiment is at a very early stage." Seiman himself reacted to the publication of Bloomberg with the phrase "the secret is out."

https://twitter.com/michaelsayman/status/991747160851935232

• Social media is the bane of Google. The company of Larry Page and Sergey Brin tried many times to launch their own social network, but all these projects failed. The most famous were Orkut, GoogleBuzz and Google+. After the failure of the latter, the company has moderated its ambitions in the social media market, writes Bloomberg, but still continues to “play with different forms of social networks” like similar gaming experimental applications in order to retain a youth audience. You can read more about the history of the emergence and failure of Google+ here , about other unsuccessful Google projects - here .
• Arcade is part of the Area 120 project , launched in 2016 by Google's internal incubator. As part of the incubator, Seiman, as the head of Arcade, receives funding and the opportunity to hire employees.

Prodigy from Peru

Behind the development of the new Google project is a typical story of the American dream. Michael Sayman is the son of Peruvian immigrants who moved to Miami. Due to the poverty of his parents, he could hardly finish school, but he learned to program - he released the first prototype of his own mobile application at the age of 12, and soon the development of more and more new applications became the only source of income for a family that could barely make ends meet. “Sometimes I feel ashamed of how much Michael has done for us. He actually became the father of the family. It’s crazy,” recalled his mother, Christina Seiman.

In the US, Seiman's parents had their own small restaurant. As the engineer said , the family worked almost around the clock, but the money was still constantly lacking. Seiman himself grew up inquisitive and learned from childhood: you can find everything on the Internet. “I was a stubborn child. I have always done my best to get what I need, even if it was crazy or irrational. When I needed help, I did not turn to my mother or father for it, I did not turn to a person. I turned to the internet."

The boy started developing applications by accident: he played the children's online game "Club Penguin" (Club Penguin) and was so carried away that he started blogging about it and, in order to increase the number of readers, decided to make a mobile version. The student spent months learning how to make apps, and after the first prototype at the age of 13, he released a full-fledged educational service for the game Club Penguin Cheats . In a week, the app got into the top 10 app guides in the AppStore, and in the first month, the student earned $5,000.

A couple more successful applications - and popularity fell on the prodigy developer. From the age of 13, he was invited to TV interviews (the first was on CNN), and they tried especially hard, of course, in Peru. In his mini-biography (as a Facebook post ), Seiman recalls how he went on tour in South America, drew thousands of spectators, his parents set him as an example to local children - but his family in the United States continued to be on the verge of poverty. Seiman worked on apps that brought in thousands of dollars—not bad money, but barely enough for food and family bills.

Photo from Seiman's Facebook page

Photo from Seiman's Facebook page

Poverty continued to win - the family was forced to sell the restaurant, the house and move (with the money of a schoolboy) to a more modest place. But it was the move that was the turning point for Seiman - he stopped doing homework, abandoned school and studied the app market instead of lessons, continued to work to help the family stay afloat. At the age of 16, Michael wrote the game app 4 Snaps, also a game app in which you have to guess words from users' own photos.

https://vimeo.com/92684154

4 Snaps changed Seiman's life - the game (download it here ) caught the attention of Mark Zuckerberg at the Facebook F8 developer conference (Seiman used the Facebook platform for coding). Seiman completed a summer internship at Facebook and, in 2014, forgoing higher education, became one of the youngest Facebook engineers in history. "The first thing I'm going to do is buy new shoes - my old ones are already 5 years old," rejoiced Seiman after being invited to work. Friends pestered the 18-year-old Seiman with questions about when he would already buy a Tesla - and now he can definitely afford it: by the age of 21, Seiman had already become a millionaire .

Snapchat killer

At Facebook, Seiman has transitioned from developer to product manager, and has also become an invaluable advisor on teen digital experiences. By this time, there was no more important competence for Facebook: Snapchat, which was rapidly gaining popularity, was eating away more and more of the youth audience, depriving the social network of the base of future users. In 2016, under the leadership of Sayman, Facebook launched the Lifestage social network, in which users were asked to record short videos instead of photos and texts. At the same time, Lifestage was closed to users over 21 years old.

Of course, the goal of the project was to try to take away part of the audience from SnapChat. But a year later, it became clear that another “Snapchat killer” was shooting – Instagram Stories. The need for the development of Lifestage disappeared, and in the summer of 2017 the application was closed . That same month, Sayman changed jobs and ended up at Google. The transition was uneventful — Saeman thanked Facebook for their work, and during the recent scandal with Cambridge Analytica actively defended Facebook and Zuckerberg.

Quote

• “That's the point of the Valley - it has become such a center of innovation because of a specific thing: the transition from one Valley company to another is very simple. We all work for Silicon Valley Corporation. because Facebook, Google and Apple are just different departments of this corporation. You change jobs, move from one company to another <...> and, most likely, you have a dozen or two people working around you who came from other companies. You have approximately the same conditions, everything works approximately the same way. In California, no one will judge you for taking and leaving for a competitor,” said Seiman’s colleague, head of virtual reality at Google Andrey Doronichev, in an interview with Elizaveta Osetinskaya as part of the Russian Norms! project.

At Google, Seiman was also thrown into one of the most relevant and competitive topics - he became a product manager in the division responsible for the Google Assistant voice assistant, which entered the fight against Amazon's Alexa. But the developer continued to devote his free time to his favorite work. Three months after moving to Google, he released the game app Lies, in which the user was asked to guess one true fact about a friend among several fictitious ones (a similar flash mob was recently popular on Russian social networks). Almost all information about the new social network game Arcade is kept secret, but it's not hard to guess that at least in part it will be the development of the Lies idea.

Artem Gubenko