Google gifts free Chrome notebooks to games developers

Google dishes out free laptops running Chrome OS to games developers at this year's Games Developer Conference in San Fran
Google dishes out free laptops running Chrome OS to games developers at this year's Games Developer Conference in San Fran

Google is courting the world's leading games designers this week, gifting free laptops to devs at the Games Developers' Conference in San Francisco.

Google reps handed blue cards to developers at two sessions at this year's GDC event, which were then able to be exchanged for a Chrome OS laptop after the events.

The annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) opened in San Francisco on Monday this week.

Free laptops for developers

The game designers were given Cr-48, the bespoke laptop hardware that runs on Google's Chrome OS. Devs were also given Google stickers to decorate their new laptops (and to show off to colleagues the fact that they had bagged the best freebie at this year's GDC no doubt!).

Google is clearly hoping that some of the world's best games creators will look to produce web applications that would run on the new netbook OS.

Google reps have been booked in for sessions covering Chrome and HTML5, WebGL, Native Client, Google App Engine, YouTube APIs and game development on Android.

Vincent Scheib, a software engineer at Google, was on hand to evangelise about the opportunities opening up for games developers with the latest web technologies built into Chrome and other modern web browsers such as Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9.

Scheib informed the games developers present that: "In the long run, we're confident we'll have high-quality solutions," to creating high-powered games that will run within a web browser.

Via InformationWeek.com

Adam Hartley