ALEXIS MOUSSINE-POUCHKINE: Hi.
Welcome back to DEVOXX 2013.
I'm here with Dan to talk about a service
that Google is offering to game developers.
So welcome, Dan.
DAN GALPIN: Thank you.
ALEXIS MOUSSINE-POUCHKINE: Tell us what this is really about
and who we're targeting with this.
DAN GALPIN: Sure.
Well, the service is Google Play Game Services.
Developers have been asking us for a long time
how to help them find users and how to help them engage users
and, more importantly, how to give them some features they've
been desperately wanting.
And so we put together a service that
give users what they've been wanting for a long time, which
is Cloud Save.
We have achievements and leaderboards,
which drive engagement.
ALEXIS MOUSSINE-POUCHKINE: OK.
DAN GALPIN: And what's really exciting about this is we
haven't just done this for Android,
but we've actually made this a cross-platform solution.
ALEXIS MOUSSINE-POUCHKINE: Hence the name.
It's not the Android service.
It's the Google--
DAN GALPIN: Exactly.
It's a Google service.
And it's really important, because we recognize
that people want to play games with not just
their friends who own Android devices.
But they want to be able to play games with their iOS friends,
friends with other devices, and, of course,
people who are using the web and Chrome.
ALEXIS MOUSSINE-POUCHKINE: OK.
Great.
So a lot of people can use this.
People have been using other solutions before.
Here, we're offering this as a service.
Obviously, it's a Google service.
You would expect this to scale, this to be always up.
And so how about sign in?
Is there any identity integration offered with that?
DAN GALPIN: Yeah.
We do use Google+ identity.
And that's really important, because we wanted privacy
to be paramount from the very start of this service.
And Google+ gives us the ability to give the users the kind
of privacy controls they expect from Google.
That's really important.
There was a lot of resistance to a lot of different sign ins
that we were seeing.
And so we said, all right.
What do we need to do in order to make
sure we get as many people as comfortable with signing
in and sharing their game activity with the people
they want to share it with as possible?
So it really was a no-brainer for us to look at Google+
identity.
ALEXIS MOUSSINE-POUCHKINE: So you
are one of the people that looks after developers
that build games.
How has this been going so far?
DAN GALPIN: There's a huge amount of excitement for it.
Again, users have been really wanting this for a long time.
And people have actually been asking me,
whether it's been developers, whether it's been gamers,
they've been coming up to me and saying, please,
please do something in this space.
And I think what's exciting is we didn't just do something,
but we're really doing something with a very broad reach.
We could have done something very, very simple, I think.
And instead, we chose to really go in
with a tremendous service.
And what's exciting to me is it's a Google service.
And game developers were really, really worried in the past.
They would go, and they would choose
a service that did some of these things.
The company would cancel it, or as it would scale,
it would start costing them a lot of money.
And what's great is we're providing this service
to game developers for free across all
these different platforms.
ALEXIS MOUSSINE-POUCHKINE: It's worth mentioning.
DAN GALPIN: And if they're successful,
they don't end up losing out, because the service is
going to scale with them.
It's not going to start costing them money.
They can be comfortable that the service is going to be around.
And that's exciting for me.
ALEXIS MOUSSINE-POUCHKINE: One of the features
is multiplayer games.
DAN GALPIN: Yes.
ALEXIS MOUSSINE-POUCHKINE: How does that really work?
And is that realtime?
What kind of gaming really can I build with that?
DAN GALPIN: I can't believe I didn't even
mention that at the beginning.
Yeah.
One of the most important features we do
is realtime multiplayer gaming.
And that allows a developer to create a mesh network
with currently up to three of their friends,
so a four-player mesh network.
And it's realtime gaming.
It's great because it chooses the fastest
route it can between the four players.
So if you're on a local network, it
will actually choose a route that will connect directly
between the players for really, really high speed, low latency
gaming.
And it'll also ping our servers and do nat traversal for you
if need to play a game over the internet.
So it's really, really powerful.
And again, what's great is in order
to do this without Google scale, you
would have to have machines and data
centers all around the world in order
to try to get low latency connections.
Google is just providing this because we
want to make the gaming experience great.
ALEXIS MOUSSINE-POUCHKINE: Awesome.
I've built a game.
I know how to build games, say, on Android.
Let's take that example.
What does it take for me to actually integrate
with that service?
And how hard is it to add it to an existing game?
DAN GALPIN: That's one of the things that's great.
It all depends on which platform you're on, of course.
On Android, we've made it part of Google Play Services.
So it's a part of things that people have already
got on their device.
We're constantly pushing updates to that,
constantly making the platform better.
And all they have to do is integrate a very, very simple
library that we've put together.
We have tons of sample code for them,
including a bunch of great little sample games that
illustrate all the different features.
We actually did a Code Lab here at DEVOXX
where we had people integrate Google Play
Services with a game.
It took about 20 minutes for most of them
to get the basic stuff all integrated.
And it's exciting.
It's exciting to see how quickly people can move on it.
On iOS, we also provide a client library.
And then for the web, it's a series of REST APIs.
And those can be used anywhere, of course, which is exciting.
It's not just focusing on these two mobile platforms.
But we wanted to make sure the experience for Android and iOS
developers was great.
It also allows us to provide a lot of features to those users.
For Android and iOS users, for example,
we support offline achievements, offline leaderboards,
all of those kinds of offline features that people expect.
ALEXIS MOUSSINE-POUCHKINE: I was going
to get to the offline part of it.
I commute.
I take the metro, and connectivity's not always
there.
DAN GALPIN: Absolutely.
It is really important.
If someone gets an achievement offline,
they want to see it pop up in the service.
They want to see that it's going to get back
to Google eventually.
And so we do.
If you get the achievement offline,
on Android we'll go and sync it in the background the next time
we get connectivity.
On iOS, we don't do that yet.
But the next time you play the game and you have connectivity,
it'll make sure to sync things up.
ALEXIS MOUSSINE-POUCHKINE: OK.
Great.
What is the experience in terms of the Google Play Developer
Console?
Do you get to see how people use your game and the API?
DAN GALPIN: You get a couple of things.
One is that you do get some basic analytics
on how people are using your game.
Obviously, I always recommend people put their own analytics
in as well.
But as we roll this out further, we're
going to have deeper and deeper engagement numbers, which
is exciting.
What's also cool is we actually get
to see the engagement numbers as well.
And I think this is exciting.
Because we don't track people's usage on Android,
so we don't know what games they're playing.
But now they're signing in.
They're saying, yes, Google, we want
you know about what we're doing.
And that gives us a much better way
of actually directing people to games that we know users love.
So it's not just a question of have they downloaded the game,
but who's actually playing, who's
actually engaging with that content.
It allows us to be much smarter in terms of Google Play.
And of course, we also have the Google Play Games application.
That's great because you can actually
go to this application.
We have, according to Google Play, between 10 and 50
million downloads of this already.
ALEXIS MOUSSINE-POUCHKINE: OK.
DAN GALPIN: You can go and see what your friends are playing,
and you can also see how your friends are progressing.
So you can go leaderboards, and that's huge for competition.
There are several games I've played because I've
seen that one of my friends was playing it,
and then I realized that I have to beat
their scores on the leaderboards.
ALEXIS MOUSSINE-POUCHKINE: Right.
DAN GALPIN: I'm naturally somewhat game competitive,
I guess.
I see it working just within our team.
And I know it's working out in the world as well.
ALEXIS MOUSSINE-POUCHKINE: Cool.
So where should developers go to learn about this?
DAN GALPIN: They should go to developers.google.com/games.
That'll take them to a page talking all about the things
that we offer for game developers.
And then if you go to developers.google.com/games/services,
that actually has all of the things we're doing with Google
Play Game Services.
But do go to the main Game site.
There's a lot of stuff we're doing for game developers
out there.
I think that it's really exciting to see Google getting
behind games the way we have in the last year.
ALEXIS MOUSSINE-POUCHKINE: Great.
Well, Dan, thanks.
This is all the time we have for.
Try it out and provide feedback.
You guys are online available?
DAN GALPIN: Absolutely.
You can go, of course, to the Android developer
channel for the Android APIs.
And of course, go to developers.google.com
to learn more about what we're doing
and to see our announcements involving games.
ALEXIS MOUSSINE-POUCHKINE: Stack Overflow is a good place?
DAN GALPIN: Stack Overflow is a great place
to ask questions, as always.
We have a team that goes and monitors that as well as making
sure that we actually integrate your feedback.
You can also actually give us feedback on our GitHub site.
That's actually where we post all the sample code.
ALEXIS MOUSSINE-POUCHKINE: Oh, good.
DAN GALPIN: And you can also post changes.
If you have any ideas or bug fixes that need to go there,
that's a great place to talk with the team as well.
ALEXIS MOUSSINE-POUCHKINE: Cool.
Game on.
DAN GALPIN: Thank you.
Game on.