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Good morning, everyone.
I'm Andy.
I'm going to be talking to you about scaling
to the next billion players.
I'm on the product marketing team for Google Cloud Platform.
So mobile and cloud are better together.
If you think of today's most compelling apps,
whether it's Uber or Spotify, Netflix, YouTube, or even Maps,
the most compelling content treats client and cloud
as a single platform.
And nowhere is this more dramatic than games.
And this is going to date me, but I
spent 10 years of my adolescence playing these multiuser
dimensions, multiuser dungeons.
We're talking 9,600 baud modems dialing up to BBSs.
And as modest as the user interface was for these,
it's amazing how much they got right.
It's amazing how much they understood their medium.
Things like a very in-depth community, a guild system,
precursor to modern day MMOs, your identity
within the community was a huge reason
for players to come back.
Live daily events-- some of these were goofy.
On Thanksgiving Day, they had turkeys running around
where you could loot.
They would drop gold and armor.
But it was just text, and admins could orchestrate
all of that on the server side.
And every day had something new for players to come back to.
Very Minecraft-esque, an infinite world of UGC.
I built a zone called Valley of the Jedi Tower,
and 15 years later, it still stands.
All the NPCs, mobs, gear, all the room descriptions,
it's still there today.
And players, non-engineers, being
able to put content back into the game
was huge and was expected.
So I think you guys get the idea.
Fast forward to today, it's a different era for gaming.
The stats for this are all over the place.
It's going to vary.
But one source, GSMA, puts 6 billion folks with smartphones
in the next four to five years.
These folks, coming online for the first time,
they're doing it through these Playstations in their pockets,
gaming great devices, that's going
to be their first experience with gaming.
And along the same theme, the other side of the coin
is ubiquitous cloud access, 4G connectivity,
broadband connectivity on the go where, in developed countries,
we're talking 100% coverage and, in developing countries,
right at the tipping point where the majority of folks
are going to have 4G coverage, that combination of mobile
and cloud together is going to make the player
experience greater than the sum of the parts.
I'm going to back up.
If you were to take something away from this short lining
talk, what Google Cloud Platform is trying to do
is to enable these great foundational gaming experiences
in a way where the complexity doesn't cause the whole house
of cards to collapse.
In other words, if you're bringing the same complexity
from the olden days to the new mediums,
you're bringing forth all this baggage.
So the one idea to take away is we succeed-- our north star--
success for us is if you're able to focus on content.
Every waking second, focus on content and not infrastructure.
And this is an eye chart, but Google Cloud Platform
is a collection of services and, really,
across compute, storage, and analytics
we have a range of abstractions, and the magic
is in choosing the right abstraction.
Abstraction's like being able to have something fully managed.
It's hard to see here, but, in this case,
you're just focusing on the content of your game, the state
of your persistent game world.
You just have a blob of content in one line of code.
It writes it globally across all gaming platforms
you care about.
The mutation is heard, and via callback, they know about it.
You don't have to manage any infrastructure.
You don't have to spin up any VMs, spin up any REST services.
It just works.
So across compute, storage, and analytics,
we have these-- what we call third wave services that
allow you to focus on your content,
and mere mortals like myself, scripters, can go and put
content into the game.
Realizing that not everyone can start with wave three services,
you can have your existing stack today,
have it run on top of Google's world class infrastructure.
So Google Cloud Platform is allowing you to take your stack
or using our cloud native services
and run it on top of Google's infrastructure.
With that, I'm at time.
And I'd like to invite you to check out
cloud.google.com/products.
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