Posted by Aurash Mahbod – General Manager, Games on Google Play
Google for Games is coming to GDC in San Francisco! Join us on March 19 for the Game Developers Conference (GDC) at the Moscone Center, where game developers from across the world will gather to learn, network, problem-solve, and help shape the future of the industry. From March 18 to March 22, experience our comprehensive suite of multi-platform game development tools and explore the new features from Play Pass at the West Hall, Level 2 Lobby.
This year, we’re proud to host eight sessions for developers, designers, business and marketing teams, and everyone else in the gaming community with an interest to grow their game business. Take a look at this year’s sessions below and if you’re interested in learning more about topics from Google Play and Android, check out key product updates from the Google for Games Developer Summit.
Scaling your game development
We’re hosting three sessions designed to help scale your game development using tools from Firebase, Android, and Google Cloud. Learn more about building high quality games with case studies from industry experts.
Beyond "Set and Forget": Advanced Debugging with Firebase Crashlytics
Tuesday, March 19, 9:30 am - 10:00 am
Crashlytics has added a number of features that make detecting, tracking, and understanding bugs even easier, from high-level to native code. Take your fixes to another level with native stack traces, memory debugging, issue annotation, and the ability to log uncaught exceptions as fatal.
Enhancing Game Performance: Vulkan and Android Adaptability Technology
Tuesday, March 19, 10:50 am - 11:50 am
Learn how to leverage Vulkan graphics API to improve your graphics quality or performance, including performance tuning with dynamic upscaling. Find out how the Android Dynamic Performance Framework (ADPF) can enhance game performance and power in Unity and native C++, with easy integration through the Unreal Engine plugin. We're also sharing how NCSoft Lineage W improved thermal status and performance using ADPF.
Creating a global-scale game with Google Cloud
Tuesday, March 19, 4:40 pm - 5:10 pm
This session will cover the best of Google Cloud's open source projects (Agones, Open Match, and more) and products (GKE, Spanner, Anthos Service Mesh, Cloud Build, Cloud Deploy, and more) to teach you how to build, deploy, and scale world-scale multiplayer games with Google Cloud.
Increasing user engagement
We’re hosting two sessions designed to help you increase engagement by creating dynamic gameplay experiences using generative AI and expanding opportunities on Google Play to grow your community of players with exclusive rewards.
Reimagine the Future of Gaming with Google AI
Tuesday, March 19, 10:50 am - 11:50 am
In our keynote session, senior executives from Google Cloud, Google Play, and Labs will share their unique perspectives on generative AI in the gaming landscape. Learn more about cutting-edge AI solutions from Google Cloud, Android, Google Play, and Labs designed to simplify game development, publishing, and business operations, plus actionable strategies to leverage AI for faster development, better player experiences, and sustainable growth.
Grow your community of loyal gamers with Google Play
Tuesday, March 19, 1:20 pm - 1:50 pm
In this session, we’ll cover new features and insights from Google Play to create rewarding experiences for gamers using Play Pass, Play Points, and Play Games Services. Get a behind-the-scenes look at how Google Play rewards a growing community of passionate gamers, and how to use this to super-charge your business.
Maximizing reach across screens
These sessions, from Google Play, Android, and Flutter, introduce ways to expand your mobile games to PC. Learn about the latest tools that will help you accelerate growth across large screens.
Bringing more users to your Google Play Games on PC game
Tuesday, March 19, 2:10 pm - 2:40 pm
Join us for an overview of Google Play Games on PC, how it has grown in the past year, and a walkthrough of how to optimize and attribute your PC advertisements for your Google Play Games on PC titles. Learn how to use Google Play Games to increase your reach and acquisition of PC users for your mobile game, as well as how to effectively use the Google Play Install Referrer API to attribute and optimize your ads across mobile and PC.
Android input on desktop: How to delight your users
Tuesday, March 19, 3:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Give your players a first-class gaming experience with our best practices for handling input between mobile and PC games, including technical details on how to implement these best practices across mobile, tablets, Chromebooks and Windows PCs1. Learn how Android handles keyboard, mouse, and controller input across different form factors, with case studies for designing for both touch and hardware input.
Building Multiplatform Games with Flutter
Tuesday, March 19, 3:50 pm - 4:20 pm
Learn why game developers are choosing Flutter to build casual games on mobile, desktop, and web browsers. We’ll cover the free, open-source tools and resources available through the Casual Games Toolkit, a collection of free and open-source tools, templates, and resources to make game dev more productive with Flutter.
Learn more about all of our sessions coming to you on March, 19, at GDC in San Francisco.
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1Windows is a trademark of the Microsoft group of companies.
4 updates from the Google for Games Developer Summit
Posted by Alex Chen, Google for Games
This week, we announced new games solutions and updates to our tools at the Google for Games Developer Summit, a free digital event for developers, publishers and advertisers. From highlighting viewership growth trends on YouTube gaming to reaching more players on different devices with Google Play Games on PC, here’s a quick recap with some of our top announcements and key updates.
1. Build high-quality games on Android
The Android team talked about how they’ve made it easier to develop fun and engaging games with updates to Android vitals and the Android Game Development Kit. They also shared how you can get these games to more users on more devices, with Android support for form factors like foldables, Chromebooks and PCs. Learn more about these announcements, including new ways to connect with a global audience, on the Android Developers blog.
2. Strengthen your ads monetization and growth strategies
Google Ads showed advertisers how to get more value from both in-app ads and in-app purchases with a new feature called target return on ad spend for hybrid monetization. And AdMob showed publishers how to save time and costs with a more efficient way to manage ad mediation, with a revamped buyer management interface and streamlined ad unit mapping workflow. See more in the Google Ads blog post.
3. Create connections with your community
As a home of popular gaming creators, videos, and livestreams worldwide, YouTube continues to see incredible growth. The YouTube team announced that over 2 trillion hours of gaming content was consumed in 2022. Through different formats, availability on multiple devices and culture-shaping Creators, they’re committed to being the place where game publishers and Creators reach players and build communities around their favorite games.
4. Keep players engaged with live service games
Google Cloud shared their strategy for live service game development. They’re combining technology that brings togethers players from all over the world, databases that store critical data for an optimal player experience and the analytics that allow game companies to foster a relationship with their players. Learn more on Google Cloud’s blog.
Whether it’s creating the newest hit game, connecting with an enthusiastic community or growing your business to reach more players everywhere, Google is glad to be your partner along the way. To learn more, you can access all content on demand. And if you’re planning to attend Game Developers Conference next week in San Francisco, come say hi at one of our in-person developer sessions.
Source: Google Developers Blog
3 things to expect at the Google for Games Developer Summit
Posted by Greg Hartrell, Product Director, Games on Play/Android
Save the date for this year’s virtual Google for Games Developer Summit, happening on March 14 at 9 a.m. PT. You’ll hear about product updates and discover new ways to build great games, connect with players around the globe and grow your business.
Here are three things you can expect during and after the event:
1. Hear about Google’s newest games products for developers
The summit kicks off at 9 a.m. PT, with keynotes from teams across Android, Google Play, Ads and Cloud. They’ll discuss the latest trends in the gaming industry and share new products we’re working on to help developers build great experiences for gamers everywhere.
2. Learn how to grow your games business in on-demand sessions
Following the keynotes, more than 15 on-demand sessions will be available starting at 10 a.m. PT, where you can learn more about upcoming products, watch technical deep dives and hear inspiring stories from other game developers. Whether you’re looking to expand your reach, reduce cheating or better understand in-game ad formats, there will be plenty of content to help you take your game to the next level.
3. Join us at the Game Developers Conference
If you’re looking for even more gaming content after the summit, join us in person for the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. We’ll host developer sessions on March 20 and 21 to share demos, technical best practices and more.
Visit g.co/gamedevsummit to learn more and get updates about both events, including the full agendas. See you there!
Source: Google Developers Blog
Google for Games Developer Summit returns March 15
Posted by Greg Hartrell, Product Director, Games on Play/Android
With over three billion players showing strong engagement worldwide, the games market continues to remain resilient and grow beyond expectations. As we look ahead this year, the influx of new and returning players creates a great opportunity for developers to scale their games businesses.
The Google for Games Developer Summit returns virtually on March 15, 2022 at 9AM Pacific. From mobile to cloud, learn about our new solutions for game developers that make it easier to build high-quality games and reach audiences around the world.
Join us for the keynote at 9AM Pacific followed by over 20 developer sessions on-demand. We’ll share deep-dives and updates on the Android Game Development Kit, Google Play Games beta on PC, Play Asset Delivery, Play Console, and more. The summit is open for all. Check out the full agenda today at g.co/gamedevsummit.
Source: Google Developers Blog
Join us for Google for Games Developer Summit 2021
Posted by Greg Hartrell, Head of Product Management, Games on Android & Google Play
With a surge of new gamers and an increase in time spent playing games in the last year, it’s more important than ever for game developers to delight and engage players. To help developers with this opportunity, the games teams at Google are back to announce the return of the Google for Games Developer Summit 2021 on July 12th-13th.
Hear from experts across Google about new game solutions they’re building to make it easier for you to continue creating great games, connecting with players, and scaling your business. Registration is free and open to all game developers.
Register for the free online event at g.co/gamedevsummit to get more details in the coming weeks. We can’t wait to share our latest innovations with the developer community.
Source: Google Developers Blog
Google for Games Developer Summit March 2020
Posted by Greg Hartrell, Head of Product Management, Games on Android & Google Play
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.
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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Source: Android Developers Blog
Update on Google at GDC 2020
Posted by the Google for Games Team
Last Friday, GDC 2020 organizers made the difficult decision to postpone the conference. We understand this decision, as we have to prioritize the health and safety of our community.
Every year, we look forward to the Game Developers Conference and surrounding events because it gives our teams a chance to connect with game developers, partners, and friends in the industry.
Although we won’t be connecting in-person this year, we’re still excited to share the latest announcements from Google with everyone through our digital experience. We'll be sharing plans for our digital experience in the coming days.
Thank you to all who keep this community thriving and check back soon at g.co/gdc2020 for more details.
Source: Android Developers Blog
Update on Google at GDC 2020
Posted by the Google for Games Team
Last Friday, GDC 2020 organizers made the difficult decision to postpone the conference. We understand this decision, as we have to prioritize the health and safety of our community.
Every year, we look forward to the Game Developers Conference and surrounding events because it gives our teams a chance to connect with game developers, partners, and friends in the industry.
Although we won’t be connecting in-person this year, we’re still excited to share the latest announcements from Google with everyone through our digital experience. We'll be sharing plans for our digital experience in the coming days.
Thank you to all who keep this community thriving and check back soon at g.co/gdc2020 for more details.
Source: Google Developers Blog
Get ready for the Game Developers Conference
Posted by Kacey Fahey, Games Developer Marketing, Google
Cross-posting from the Google Developers Blog.
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.
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.
