On June 12, June 15 -- SAN FRANCISCO - For a while, there was a small community of developers who tried to build flight games on top of Google's 3D Tiles API - the same photorealistic satellite mesh that makes Google Earth look the way it does. The problem, as one developer put it in a widely circulated post, was that Google owned the data and charged heavily for it. "You made a web game using Google's 3D tiles and quickly your bill would be $10,000," the developer wrote. The economics killed the idea every time.

it built the flight simulator itself.

The company quietly pushed an experimental flight simulator to the web version of Google Earth, making it available globally to anyone with a desktop browser and a Google account. No downlo...