Posted by Lauren Mytton, Product Manager, Google Play

Google Play has over 2.5B monthly active users, distributed across the world, using many different devices. How do you make the most of this opportunity?

The concept of quality reach

The foundations for your game’s (or app’s) success on Google Play are its reach and its quality:

• Reach: Can a player access your game?
• Quality: Does the player experience good quality when playing your game?

To unlock the opportunity for any single user on Google Play, you need both: every user must be able to access your game, AND have a good technical experience when playing it.

This is the ideal state of quality reach.

Why quality reach is foundational to your game’s success

When you have quality reach, your game development, marketing budgets, and growth strategy can be lined up to reinforce each other, because you acquire users for whom your game performs well, and your engagement and retention strategies have higher ROI for users with good experiences.

If you have poor quality reach, you can inadvertently acquire users whom you will not be able to engage and retain. Any spend to acquire these users is likely to be wasted. But the bigger problem is that poor quality reach makes it harder for you to acquire users for whom your game does perform well, since Android vitals and user ratings may affect your game’s discoverability and conversion in the Play store.

Another scenario to keep an eye on is missed reach. Unlike poor quality reach, it may not hurt your ability to acquire users who can access and enjoy your game. However it still limits your game’s scale and possibly also its ROI.

How you achieve quality reach

There are three types of decisions that determine your quality reach:

• Devices: the device specs you build for and target
• Geographies: the countries, languages or localization you offer
• Testing and optimization: what you plan for and prioritize during development and pre-launch

You make these decisions when you develop and publish a game for the first time, and you continue to make them with every new release over the lifecycle of your game. You also need to think about these decisions outside your release cycle, since the Play ecosystem is constantly changing, which means your quality reach will also change over time, even if you do nothing.

However these decisions can be very hard. They require you to answer, or predict the answers to, two questions:

1. Where are my users?
2. Where are my issues?

These questions are challenging because of the scale and diversity of users on Google Play, both technically and geographically. Not only that, but these decisions may be made at different points in time, across both business and technical teams. How do you get them to line up?

How Reach and devices can help

We’re launching a new tool in Play Console called Reach and devices to help with these challenges. Reach and devices is a data and insights tool that helps you to plan for quality reach, by helping you understand or predict the distribution of your users and your issues across the Google Play ecosystem.

Reach and devices takes data about your app and its peers and presents it in new ways, to help you answer these questions. It also makes it easier to get all the relevant teams in your organisation on the same page.

Key features:

• Distribution and trends of user and issue metrics, starting with install base, crash rate and ANR rate (more metrics to come)
• Metric breakdowns by key attributes including Android version, RAM, SoC, OpenGL ES version, Vulkan version and screen metrics (with more to come)
• Peer data so you can spot opportunities in your current game, or even plan your next game
• Country-level filtering for more precise launch and expansion planning
• Export all data for bespoke analysis

We’ve received great feedback during closed beta from developers who have found it useful in a variety of ways:

• Deciding what device specs to support
• Spotting optimization opportunities
• Assessing the ROI of addressing issues
• Narrowing down the root cause of technical issues

Get started

Visit g.co/play/reachanddevices for more information or go straight to Play Console to check it out.

Posted by Lauren Mytton, Product Manager, Google Play

Google Play has over 2.5B monthly active users, distributed across the world, using many different devices. How do you make the most of this opportunity?

The concept of quality reach

The foundations for your game’s (or app’s) success on Google Play are its reach and its quality:

• Reach: Can a player access your game?
• Quality: Does the player experience good quality when playing your game?

To unlock the opportunity for any single user on Google Play, you need both: every user must be able to access your game, AND have a good technical experience when playing it.

This is the ideal state of quality reach.

Why quality reach is foundational to your game’s success

When you have quality reach, your game development, marketing budgets, and growth strategy can be lined up to reinforce each other, because you acquire users for whom your game performs well, and your engagement and retention strategies have higher ROI for users with good experiences.

If you have poor quality reach, you can inadvertently acquire users whom you will not be able to engage and retain. Any spend to acquire these users is likely to be wasted. But the bigger problem is that poor quality reach makes it harder for you to acquire users for whom your game does perform well, since Android vitals and user ratings may affect your game’s discoverability and conversion in the Play store.

Another scenario to keep an eye on is missed reach. Unlike poor quality reach, it may not hurt your ability to acquire users who can access and enjoy your game. However it still limits your game’s scale and possibly also its ROI.

How you achieve quality reach

There are three types of decisions that determine your quality reach:

• Devices: the device specs you build for and target
• Geographies: the countries, languages or localization you offer
• Testing and optimization: what you plan for and prioritize during development and pre-launch

You make these decisions when you develop and publish a game for the first time, and you continue to make them with every new release over the lifecycle of your game. You also need to think about these decisions outside your release cycle, since the Play ecosystem is constantly changing, which means your quality reach will also change over time, even if you do nothing.

However these decisions can be very hard. They require you to answer, or predict the answers to, two questions:

1. Where are my users?
2. Where are my issues?

These questions are challenging because of the scale and diversity of users on Google Play, both technically and geographically. Not only that, but these decisions may be made at different points in time, across both business and technical teams. How do you get them to line up?

How Reach and devices can help

We’re launching a new tool in Play Console called Reach and devices to help with these challenges. Reach and devices is a data and insights tool that helps you to plan for quality reach, by helping you understand or predict the distribution of your users and your issues across the Google Play ecosystem.

Reach and devices takes data about your app and its peers and presents it in new ways, to help you answer these questions. It also makes it easier to get all the relevant teams in your organisation on the same page.

Key features:

• Distribution and trends of user and issue metrics, starting with install base, crash rate and ANR rate (more metrics to come)
• Metric breakdowns by key attributes including Android version, RAM, SoC, OpenGL ES version, Vulkan version and screen metrics (with more to come)
• Peer data so you can spot opportunities in your current game, or even plan your next game
• Country-level filtering for more precise launch and expansion planning
• Export all data for bespoke analysis

We’ve received great feedback during closed beta from developers who have found it useful in a variety of ways:

• Deciding what device specs to support
• Spotting optimization opportunities
• Assessing the ROI of addressing issues
• Narrowing down the root cause of technical issues

Get started

Visit g.co/play/reachanddevices for more information or go straight to Play Console to check it out.

Posted by Posted by Scott Carbon-Ogden, Product Manager Android Games

Today we’re launching the Android Game Development Kit (AGDK), a full range of tools and libraries to help you develop, optimize, and deliver high quality Android games.

AGDK features follow three key tenets:

• Code built for game development. All of our libraries have been built and tested with performance in mind using C or C++ APIs.
• Reduce fragmentation. The AGDK tools and libraries work across many different Android versions. Most of these features will work on almost any device in use today.
• Built by Android, for Android. Features will be enhanced by future Android platform updates, and the libraries will provide backwards compatibility when possible.

In this initial launch, we’re focusing on covering three major areas where we heard a lot of feedback from our developer community: Integrated workflows, C/C++ game libraries, and performance optimization.

Integrated workflows

Generally, the less you need to switch tools, the more efficient you can be, so with AGDK, we’re providing new tools to facilitate Android game development in your primary IDE. We will focus on the bits of workflow where Google can add unique value and solve Android specific problems, while being compatible with whichever parts of your existing workflow you are comfortable with.

• The Android Game Development Extension adds Android as a platform target to Visual Studio. This enables existing multi-platform Visual Studio game projects to quickly integrate Android as a new platform. Learn more in the AGDE session.
• We are working with some of the most popular game engine developers to integrate our tools and libraries directly, so you can benefit from enhanced performance and stability without needing to make any changes.
• Where that’s not possible, we’ve focused on building plugins for game engines such as Unity. These plugins are available in one place to help you quickly get what you need.

C/C++ game libraries

Start your C development with less Java Native Interface (JNI) by using our game libraries for C/C++ development. Most games and game engines are written in C++, whereas Android development often requires using the Java programming language. Bridging these two languages using a Java Native Interface requires effort and can introduce bugs or performance regressions. AGDK will help you build and customize game engines by providing C game libraries that minimize the use of the Java Programming language and JNI. This makes your games easier to build, debug, and maintain.

We’re focusing on what you’ve told us are your top frustrations. Initially, this will involve building foundational classes for activity and input. Longer term, we plan to make more C libraries to provide functionality that is commonly used across game engines. We're incorporating our existing frame pacing and high-performance audio libraries into this effort, and adding three new ones:

• Game Activity provides a foundation for C++ games to be built on. It provides C interfaces for all the Android events that you'd expect, from screen rotation to app lifecycle. This way you can minimize the amount of development time you spend in the Java language. Unlike Native Activity, Game Activity is compatible with fragments and extendable, making it easier to integrate some of your favourite SDKs.
• Game Text input provides a stable way to use the software keyboard in C, that is officially supported and will work across Android versions.
• Game Controller is a way to handle input from game controllers in C, to map their functions and to reconnect to the device when necessary.

Learn more about these libraries in our C/C++ libraries session.

To make integration as easy as possible, you can get all our libraries as a Maven dependency, as a pre-compiled Zip file, or as source code.

Performance optimization

Our goal is to help you find any stability or performance issues before launch and monitor your game post-launch to catch any issues. We’re starting with the most important metrics like frame rate, loading time, and memory, and will be including new metrics over time.

• We’re launching a major update to the Android GPU Inspector (AGI), that includes frame profiling functionality. This works alongside the existing GPU profiling elements to help you fully understand any GPU related issues. AGI is currently in open beta, and you can learn more in our GPU inspector session.
• We also have a suite of profilers in Android Studio and AGDE for the system, power, CPU, and our new native memory profiler that game devs can use to find inefficiencies.
• Android Performance Tuner provides user telemetry. You can use it to see how different parts of your game perform and how your game performs across different devices. You may already be using this tool for frame rate, and now we’re launching a new loading time function. Learn more in our Android Performance Tuner session.

Visit g.co/android/AGDK for our latest resources for Android game development and to download the AGDK. Check out the mobile session track for the full lineup of sessions from the Google for Games Developer Summit.

Posted by Posted by Greg Hartrell, Product Management Director, Google Play & Android

Last year we saw Android and Play reach new heights with people playing more games safely at home. By continually making Google Play a better place for consumers, we've made it a richer place for game developers to connect with a diverse global audience. So much in fact, that Android has reached 3B monthly active devices, and Play grew to reach 2.5B monthly active users driving 140B installations worldwide.

At Google we build for everyone, and that means we’re here to help all developers reach gamers in the right moments: from the largest game studios, to the indie shops conjuring up fun and innovative games across the world.

During our Game Developer Summit, we shared updates on a breadth of tools and solutions to help you across the lifecycle of your gaming business. We announced new tools to make game development easier, updates on a growing ecosystem to help get your games running on more screens, and new opportunities to drive your go-to-market success on Google Play.

Here’s more about everything we shared and how you can get started today.

Easier development

• We launched the Android Game Development Kit, a full range of tools and libraries to help you develop, optimize, and deliver high quality Android games. In this initial launch, AGDK covers three major areas:

  1. Integrated workflows (e.g. a new Visual Studio extension)

  2. Essential C/C++ game libraries (e.g. the new Game Text Input library)

  3. Performance optimization (e.g. frame profiler support in our GPU profiler and new loading time support in Android Performance Tuner)

  • In Android 12, we’re working on two new areas. Game dashboard provides an overlay experience with quick access to key utilities during gameplay - like screen capture, recording, and more, and will be available on select devices later this year. With Game Mode APIs, you can react to players selecting a performance profile for their game - like better battery life for a long commute, or performance mode to get peak frame rates. Integrate Game Mode APIs prior to the launch of Android 12 via Beta releases.
  • Reach and devices is a new data and insights tool that helps you plan for more success on Google Play. It enables you to understand and predict the distribution of your users and technical issues across countries and key device attributes (like Android version, memory, graphics stack and chipsets). You can use it to make the business case for country and device targeting decisions, to spot optimization opportunities, and to set test priorities for your next release.
  • Firebase Remote Config lets you update the behavior and appearance of your game for different audience segments without releasing a new version. The new personalization feature is now available in early access via the Firebase Alpha program. It uses the power of Google’s machine learning to automatically deliver the best experience to each of your users, individually.

More screens

• On Chrome OS this past year, Google Play usage grew 300%, marking its biggest year of app and game usage since we launched Google Play on Chromebooks in 2016. Unity recently introduced support for Chrome OS on Unity 2021.2, with support for Unity 2020 LTS coming later this year. Optimize your game and join the growing number of developers building for Chrome OS today to access this rapidly expanding audience.

Go-to-market success

• Play as you download, built into the core of Android 12, will allow users to get into gameplay in seconds while game assets are downloaded in the background. We are seeing games being ready to open at least 2 times faster and we are very excited about the improved user experience.
• We’ve continued our innovation with Play Asset Delivery to ensure players spend less time waiting for downloads without sacrificing the quality of your game. Now, Texture Compression Format Targeting automatically figures out what modern compression formats to use to further reduce your game’s size.
• Ratings and Reviews in the Play Console now offer new ways to help you understand your game’s ratings with views across different form-factors, the ability to access and query your ratings history, and new historical ratings metrics.
• We refreshed Pre-registration in Play Store to be more useful. And now you can use App campaigns for pre-registration to build greater excitement for your game in open testing, or to drive pre-registrations in the Play Store.
• The new Play Integrity API is designed to help you fight abuse, such as cheating and unauthorized early access by helping you determine if you’re interacting with your genuine game binary, installed by Google Play, on a genuine Android device. Express interest in the Play Integrity API early access program.

Check out the mobile session track for the full lineup of sessions from the Google for Games Developer Summit and bookmark g.co/android/games for our latest resources for Android game development.