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Google for Games Developer Summit March 2020

Posted by Greg Hartrell, Head of Product Management, Games on Android & Google Play

"Developer Summit Google for Games " with game illustration.

While we're sorry we didn't get to see you all in person at GDC, we hope you are all staying healthy and safe. As many of us look to press on with work as much as possible, we’d like to share with you what our teams have been working on at the digital Google for Games Developer Summit. We couldn’t be happier with the continued growth of the vibrant Android gaming ecosystem. In fact, Android remains the world's most popular mobile platform with more than 2.5 billion monthly active devices and great news for game developers, we’re seeing more than 1.4 trillion minutes played per month in your games on Google Play. It’s important to us that our platforms are highly useful to every kind of game developer, so our payment system helps games monetize in more than 65 countries. Moreover, we offer our users more than 275 local forms of payment, including more than 180 carrier billing options, with gift cards sold in over 900 thousand unique retail locations worldwide.

Across Android and Google Play, our mission is to deliver the best platform to build, discover, and experience games. Specifically, we’re working on ways to help you increase the reach of your games and manage the fragmentation of the Android ecosystem. We’re also focused on helping you access a wider player base, once you’ve made a great game and are ready to get it out there. Last year, we shared that we’re investing heavily in our games efforts to address your challenges in these areas, and now we are excited to share several new tools and services built specifically with game developers in mind.

Catch up on everything shared at g.co/gamedevsummit.

New Android tools for mobile game development

A major area of investment for us has been making it easier for developers to build and optimize games for Android. Here’s a round-up of several new tools we’re releasing:

  • Android Studio Profilers: We’ve overhauled our Android Studio System Trace profiler to allow you to inspect and visualize in fine detail how your code is being executed. We also added native memory profiling capabilities so you can see how your game is allocating memory and find memory leaks. Download Android Studio 4.1 Canary and watch the session.
  • Android Game Development Extension for Visual Studio: We’re introducing a new tool to make it easy to add Android support for your cross-platform games. This integrates easily with existing Visual Studio-based workflows so now you can conveniently generate APKs, deploy to Android devices or an emulator, and debug your Android game from within Visual Studio. Apply for the developer preview and watch the session.
  • Android GPU Inspector: Our new Android GPU Inspector enables you to look deeply into an Android GPU and see detailed information about your game’s render stages and GPU counters. Now graphics engineers are empowered with information and insights to optimize their game for better frame rates and more battery life. Apply for the developer preview and watch the session.
  • Game Package Registry for Unity by Google: Our new package registry consolidates various Google APIs, starting with Google Play Billing, Android App Bundles, Play Asset Delivery, Play Instant, and Firebase for Games, all in one place. Learn more and watch the session.
  • Crytek announces Android support: CRYENGINE is known as a high performance game engine for PCs and game consoles and will be adding a full Android pipeline to their engine this summer. Learn more.

New ways to reach more devices & users

We’ve been working to help developers scale their reach to a growing player-base across the Android ecosystem. Today, we’re introducing a few new tools to help your development process and provide greater insights into your game’s performance.

  • Google Play Asset Delivery: Introducing a new set of delivery features for games services, building on our App Bundle infrastructure to give you free, dynamic delivery of the right game assets to the right devices at the right time. All of this allows players to get into your game faster while assets are being downloaded, while you cut the costs of hosting and delivering d game resources. Learn more and watch the session.
  • Android vitals native crash symbolication: Now you can debug your native crashes more easily with support for native symbols in Play Console. Simply upload your native debug symbols to get the benefits in Android Vitals. Apply for the open beta and watch the session.
  • Android vitals performance insights with Android Performance Tuner: We’re making it possible to optimize your frame rate and fidelity across many devices at scale with new performance insights in Android vitals. For those in our developer preview, you can unlock this by integrating the new Android Performance Tuner into your game: a new library in the Android Game SDK. Apply for the developer preview and watch the session.
  • Play Billing Library 2 for Unity developers: Game developers using Unity can now access all of Play Billing Library 2's features, such as allowing users to pay with cash and surfacing IAPs outside of the game. This is the best way for Unity developers to prepare for Play’s Billing Library version requirements in 2021. Learn more.

New ways to reach more devices and win go-to-market

The Google Play store is shifting to be more gameplay centric by showing more visuals that demonstrate gameplay and a new system of tags to help users learn more about specific game traits and aid in exploration. Learn how you can ensure your game is of high-quality and leverage various features and new services to help you succeed in your go-to-market activities.

  • Emphasis on quality: We continue to emphasize high quality gaming experiences across Google Play, to encourage immersive gameplay with strong technical performance and being free of crashes. Learn more.
  • Pre-registration: Hundreds-of-millions of players use pre-registration campaigns on Google Play each year, making it an effective way to expand the reach on launch. We’ll soon be rolling out day 1 auto-installation for all pre-registration games, to help you build early consumer awareness and capture pre-launch demand.
  • Play Pass: Late last year we launched Play Pass in the US market as a subscription service providing users with access to hundreds of great apps and games on Google Play, completely free of ads and in-app purchases. Learn more and express interest.

Thanks for your support in continuing to build incredible games. Make sure to try some of the new tools and services we just released and catch the full playlist of mobile developer sessions. If you’re interested in sharing feedback to help shape the development of cutting edge features, apply to join our developer preview programs from Android and Google Play. You can also learn about all of the offerings we have to help game developers building on Android at d.android.com/games.

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Get ready for the Game Developers Conference

Posted by Kacey Fahey, Games Developer Marketing, Google

Cross-posting from the Google Developers Blog.

Google For Games at GDC March 16-20, 2020

Join us online or live* at the Google Developer Summits during the Game Developers Conference on March 16 and 17 to learn about the latest tools and updates to build great games, reach more players, and improve discovery of your game.

Google has lots to share with the game development community at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in March. Check out our plans and sign up to keep up to date with the latest GDC news and announcements from Android, Google Play, Firebase, and more.

For one week, tens of thousands of creators from the gaming community come together at GDC to hear the latest industry innovations and network with peers to enable better gaming experiences for players around the world.

Below is a preview of what to expect from Google, and remember, it’s just the beginning. Don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter as we reveal more leading up to the event, or you can check out our website, Google for Games at GDC.

Google for Games Keynote

We will start the week with the Google for Games Keynote on Monday, March 16 at 9:30 am PST. Join the livestream and learn about the latest tools and solutions to help game developers create great games, connect with players, and scale their businesses.

GDC 2019 Keynote picture

Google Developer Keynote photo at GDC 2019

Google Developer Summit

We have two days of in-depth sessions where you can uplevel your skills across Google products and solutions. Topics range from new tools to optimize game development, how to reach more devices and players, using new Firebase features to alleviate infrastructure management challenges, and much more.

Learn more about the Google Developer Summit we’ll be hosting on March 16 -17 and how you can join in person with an official GDC ticket or via livestream.

We’ll be sharing more details about everything we have planned at GDC in the coming weeks so be sure to sign up to be among the first to hear the latest updates, and save the date to watch the keynote and other Developer Summit sessions at g.co/gdc2020.

More to come soon!

The Google for Games team

*On-site events are part of the official Game Developers Conference and require a pass to attend.

Google Mobile Developer Day at Game Developers Conference 2019

Posted by Kacey Fahey, Developer Marketing, Google Play & Android

We're excited to host the Google Mobile Developer Day at Game Developers Conference 2019. We are taking this opportunity to share best practices and our plans to help your games businesses, which are fuelling incredible growth in the global mobile games market. According to Newzoo, mobile games revenue is projected to account for nearly 60% of global games revenue by 2021. The drivers of this growth come in many forms, including more developers building great games, new game styles blurring the lines of traditional genres, and the explosion of gaming in emerging markets - most notably in India.

Image Source: GamesIndustry.biz

To support your growth, Google is focused on improving the game development experience on Android. We are investing in tools to give you better insights into what is happening on devices, as well as in people and teams to address your feedback about the development process, graphics, multiplayer experiences, and more.

We have some great updates and new tools to improve game discovery and monetization on Google Play, which we also shared today during our Mobile Developer Day:

Pre-registration now in general availability

Starting today, we are launching pre-registration for general availability. Set up a pre-registration campaign in the Google Play Console and start marketing your games to build awareness before launch. Users who pre-register receive a notification at launch, which helps increase day one installs.

Google Play Instant gaining adoption

We have seen strong adoption of Google Play Instant with 3x growth in the number of instant games and 5x growth in the number of instant sessions over the last six months. Instant experiences allow players to tap the 'Try Now' button on your store listing page and go straight to a demo experience in a matter of seconds, without installing. Now, they're even easier to build with Cocos and Unity plug-ins and an expanded implementation partner program. Discover the latest updates on Google Play Instant.

Android App Bundles momentum and new large download size threshold

Over 60K apps and games on Google Play are now using the Android App Bundle publishing format, which is supported in Android Studio, Unity, and Cocos Creator. The app bundle uses Google Play's Dynamic Delivery to deliver a smaller, optimized APK containing only the resources needed for a specific device.

To better support high quality game experiences and reflect improved devices, we've also increased the size limit for APKs generated from app bundles to 150MB and raised the threshold for large download user warnings on the Google Play Store to 150MB, from 100MB.

Improved tools in the Google Play Console

Store listing experiments let you A/B test changes to your store listing on actual Play Store visitors. We recently rolled out improvements, introducing two new metrics - first time installers and D1 retained users - to more accurately reflect the performance of your store listings. These two new metrics are now reported with hourly intervals and are available via email notifications, letting you see results faster and track performance better.

Country targeted store listings allow you to tailor your app's store listing to appeal to users in different countries. You can customize the app title, icon, descriptions and graphic assets, allowing you to better appeal to users in specific target markets. For example, you can now tailor your store listing with different versions of the English language for users in India versus the United States.

Rewarded ads give players the choice to watch an advertisement in exchange for in-app items. With rewarded ads in Google Play, you can now create and manage rewarded ads through the Google Play Console. No additional SDK integrations are required.

We hope you try some of these new tools and keep sharing ideas so we can make Android and Google Play a better place to grow your business. We are committed to continue improving the platform and building tools that better serve the gaming community.

Get started today by visiting two new resources, a hub for developers interested in creating games on Android and games.withgoogle.com, for developers looking to connect and scale their business across Google. Many of these updates and resources come from community suggestions, so sign up for our monthly newsletter to stay informed.

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5 tips for indie game success, from indie game developers

Posted by Sarah Thomson, BD Partnerships Lead, Indies, Google Play Games

Mobile gaming is a fun place to be right now. It's a landscape seeing tremendous success year after year with great potential for additional growth and innovation. It's also a space where developers can express themselves with creative game styles, mechanics, design and more. This is what the indie community does best.

Here are 5 tips for indies by indies, shared by our gaming partners at 505 Games, About Fun, Disruptor Beam, Klei Entertainment, and Schell Games.


1. Embrace being indie


Indies are inherently smaller operations and should embrace their agility and ability to take risks. Petr Vodak, CEO at About Fun, recommends getting your product out there so you can start taking feedback and apply your learnings to future projects. Don't be afraid to fail! Remaining flexible and building in modularity so you can evolve with the business needs is a strategy embraced by Pete Arden, CMO at Disruptor Beam. For instance, with their game Star Trek Timelines, the initial user experience was tailored to avid Star Trek fans. Over time, as user acquisition costs increased, they've changed the new player experience to appeal to their evolving user base of gamers looking for a fun entertainment experience and less the specific Star Trek IP.

2. Find a way to stand out


To help stand out in the ultra competitive mobile space, Jesse Schell, CEO of Schell Games, recommends doing something clever or very different. This strategy has led them to explore the growth areas of new platforms such as AR & VR. While new platforms present a field for opportunity and creativity, they're best to be approached with the long term in mind allowing you to sustain the business until critical mass is reached.

3. Build a community


There are many ways to build communities. If you have an existing fan base on other platforms, cross-promote to drive awareness of your mobile offerings. You can also look at porting titles over, but be aware of the differences in mobile gaming habits and ensure you adapt your game accordingly.

4. Engage after install


Both 505 Games and Klei Entertainment recommend running your premium titles as a service. Through monitoring user reviews you can gain invaluable feedback and trends helping you better understand user pain points and desires. In addition, by releasing regular content updates and in-game events you create reason for users to get back in the game. This not only drives reengagement, but 505 Games also sees strong spikes in new installs aligned with major game updates.

5. Monetize in different ways


Similar strategy to above, dropping regular content refreshes and game updates while offering a variety of monetization options gives users more ways to engage with your game. Keeping your games fresh gives users reason to come back and builds loyalty so you can cross-promote to your users with future game launches.

If you're looking for a fun new game to play, check out the great selection on Indie Corner on Google Play. And if you're working on a new indie game of your own, nominate your title for inclusion.

Watch more sessions from Google Developer Day at GDC17 on the Android Developers YouTube channel to learn tips for success. Visit the Android Developers website to stay up-to-date with features and best practices that will help you grow a successful business on Google Play.


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5 tips for building communities on mobile

Posted by Dave Geffon, Partnerships Manager, Google Play Games

The most successful games usually have the strongest communities. They are a powerful force in driving additional engagement and increasing awareness for your titles. At GDC 2017, we spoke with a few game developers about best practices for successfully building their own communities. Watch the panel session below to hear advice from Seriously, Social Point, and Super Evil MegaCorp.


1. Be authentic

Community is a mindset; be honest, transparent & patient with your communications. Loyal users are extremely valuable, thus the folks at Super Evil Megacorp say that you should act like you have to earn every player.

2. Start small

Build a plan and start today. Launch your social media channels, look into influencers, and create a strategy. Whether it's sharing one piece of fan art a week across your network, or running a closed beta to gather feedback from your most valued users, take action and learn what works best for you and your users.

3. Play match-maker

When finding influencers to support your game, ensure they're a genuine match. Make sure the influencer's audience is a good fit with your game and existing community.

4. Seek feedback 

Communities are passionate. Use feedback to understand what kind of game and features your users want. Be flexible and iterative so you can react and evolve your game with the needs and desires of your community. However, don't be afraid to stay true to what you stand for as sometimes you'll need to agree to disagree with some players.

5. Build for the long-term

The lifespan of games is continuing to grow. Plan your business strategy, update cycles and community efforts to roll out over time and expand with your growing experiences and user-base.
Watch more sessions from Google Developer Day at GDC17 on the Android Developers YT channel to learn tips for success. Also, visit the Android Developers website to stay up-to-date with features and best practices that will help you grow a successful business on Google Play.

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5 Tips for launching successful apps and games on Google Play

Posted by Adam Gutterman, Go-To-Market Strategic Lead, Google Play Games

Last month at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), we held a developer panel focused on sharing best practices for building successful app and game businesses. Check out 5 tips for developers, both large and small, as shared by our gaming partners at Electronic Arts (EA), Hutch Games, Nix Hydra, Space Ape Games and Omnidrone.



1. Test, test, test

The best time to test, is before you launch; so test boldly and test a lot! Nix Hydra recommends testing creative, including art style and messaging, as well as gameplay mechanics, onboarding flows and anything else you're not sure about. Gathering feedback from real users in advance of launching can highlight what's working and what can be improved to ensure your game's in the best shape possible at launch.

2. Store listing experiments

Run experiments on all of your store listing page assets. Taking bold risks instead of making assumptions allows you to see the impact of different variables with your actual user base on Google Play. Test in different regions to ensure your store listing page is optimized for each major market, as they often perform differently.

3. Early Access program

Space Ape Games recently used Early Access to test different onboarding experiences and gameplay control methods in their game. Finding the right combination led them to double-digit growth in D1 retention. Gathering these results in advance of launch helped the team fine tune and polish the game, minimizing risk before releasing to the masses.

"Early Access is cool because you can ask the big questions and get real answers from real players," Joe Raeburn, Founding Product Guy at Space Ape Games.

 Watch the Android Developer Story below to hear how Omnidrone benefits from Early Access using strong user feedback to improve retention, engagement and monetization in their game.


Mobile game developer Omnidrone benefits from Early Access.

4. Pre-registration

 Electronic Arts has run more than 5 pre-registration campaigns on Google Play. Pre-registration allows them to start marketing and build awareness for titles with a clear call-to-action before launch. This gives them a running start on launch day having built a group of users to activate upon the game's release resulting in a jump in D1 installs.

5. Seek feedback

All partners strongly recommended seeking feedback early and often. Feedback tells both sides of the story, by pointing out what's broken as well as what you're doing right. Find the right time and channels to request feedback, whether they be in-game, social, email, or even through reading and responding to reviews within the Google Play store.

If you're a startup who has an upcoming launch on Google Play or has launched an app or game recently and you're interested in opportunities like Early Access and pre-registration, get in touch with us so we can work with you.

Watch sessions from Google Developer Day at GDC17 on the Android Developers YT channel to learn tips for success. Also, visit the Android Developers website to stay up-to-date with features and best practices that will help you grow a successful business on Google Play.


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Readying AdMob for the Second App Economy with New Features: Livestream from GDC Today

According to Gartner, more than 130 billion apps will be downloaded onto phones and tablets in 2014, and most of them will be free. At the same time, revenue from apps is expected to grow by over 200% in the next 4 years. That may sound contradictory, but the reason has been clear to many developers for some time: while the first app economy was predominantly focused on paying for apps up front, we’re now seeing the rise of a second app economy, the era of free apps and incremental payments.

In this second app economy, the currency of success has altered significantly, centered on three critical areas:

  • Understanding audiences: Developers should be able to segment their audiences based on in-app behavior and turn data into useful insights for better monetization.

  • Growing in-app purchase revenue: According to Gartner, soon in-app purchases will account for almost half of all app store revenues, but this model requires a sophisticated approach from app developers and the right tools haven’t been available.

  • Maximizing ad revenue: Developers shouldn’t have to worry about managing ads; ads should optimize themselves, in real time, so developers can focus on other important parts of their business.

To help every developer succeed in this new economy, the AdMob team will be at the Game Developers Conference today to share four announcements.

1. Google Analytics now directly available in AdMob.
We introduced mobile app analytics in mid 2012 and there are hundreds of thousands of app developers using it already. We've now built Google Analytics directly into AdMob so developers can understand how people are using their app, segment them based on behavior in just a few clicks, then act on those insights. For example, the Google Analytics ecommerce report shows key insights into in-app purchases: top items sold, overall revenue and average order value. Now that Google Analytics is built directly into AdMob, developers can have a holistic view on their monetization based not only on revenue from ads but also on in-app purchase performance. All these functionalities have been incorporated into the updated Home tab in AdMob, making it a one-stop shop for all your performance reports.

2. In-App Purchase Ads.
To help developers promote in-app purchases to users in a more relevant way, we're also introducing in-app purchase ads. A developer can use these ads to promote in-app items at the right time to the users who are most likely to make a purchase, while still showing AdMob ads to those who aren't. Segmentation tools enable developers to quickly find these users, and then in-app purchase ads can be used to build relevant interstitial ads to reach them. For example, a developer can discover which of their users began playing their game in the last 48 hours, and promote a ‘welcome pack’ of extra lives at a 50% discount. This creates a more customized experience for users and can help prolong engagement. A developer can also choose where to place these interstitial ads in their app, and they can appear in either portrait or landscape mode.

In-App Purchase Ad

3. Ad network optimization and Live CPM.
If a developer is using more than one ad network to monetize their apps, a mediation tool helps to manage them. However, these tools may not optimize for the highest revenue. To solve this, ad network optimization obtains the most up-to-date CPMs from ad networks in the AdMob mediation stack, and requests ads from the highest paying one.

Live CPM goes one step further to ensure developers earn the most money from their ad impressions. When a developer uses AdMob to monetize, they get real-time access to all of Google’s demand sources, including programmatic demand, via our integration with DoubleClick Ad Exchange. For each ad request, Live CPM compares the highest CPM a developer can get from Google’s demand sources, with the CPM they could get from other networks in their mediation stack. If a higher-paying ad is available from Google’s demand sources, it will serve that ad over lower-paying CPMs offered by the other networks. App developer iHandy Inc. began using Live CPM in February this year. Many apps' revenues increased at different rates, and certain apps achieved a 200% increase.

4. The App Developer Business Kit.
The App Developer Business Kit is an in-depth website designed to help app developers understand ways to build a successful business. For example, there are detailed chapters about building an app, different ways to earn money, and options for marketing your app. You can also check out the interviews with developers, read case studies and view market insights from AdMob surveys which give developers a head start into building apps for global users. For example, did you know that a third of smartphone gamers in China have spent money in apps to personalize characters?

Tune into Google’s GDC livestream today at 10AM PST. We have sessions for game developers all day, and the AdMob talk is from 12-12.30PM PST.

Posted by Jonathan Alferness, Product Management Director, Google