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VLAD RADU: Hi.
My name is Vlad Radu, and I'm a product manager
on Play Games Services.
My team's focus is on enabling seamless continuity
across the entire Google Play gaming ecosystem.
For today's talk, I'm joined by my colleague Andrew Giugliano.
We've already heard in the keynote
about the amazing new Google Play Games on PC.
To recap, here are some of the great features it includes.
Seamless game continuity from mobile
to PC to ensure all products and purchases are available.
An approachable Windows desktop client with rich clusters
for game discovery.
And simple and easy distribution through the Google Play
Console.
And you've already learned that the seamless continuity
of experience is powered by the new and improved Play Game
Services.
So in this session, we'll do a deep dive into what PGS is
and how we can use it to power continuity for your users.
To start off, let's settle on what seamless continuity is,
which is the property of a game that allows users to switch
between devices while providing a frictionless restoration
of the game state to the device.
And we spoke just now that many users want
to switch between their phones and PCs,
and how continuity is a key expectation.
However, we should already be thinking
about the many users that are already
switching between multiple devices, like phones, tablets,
or Chromebooks, over the course of the same day.
And we need to remember that everyone changes to a new phone
from time to time.
With so many opportunities for users to change devices,
and with billions of users on Google Play,
there will be many millions who will
need to restore their game states on another device
every single day.
And that journey of restoring state is critical to users.
Our internal research shows that if it doesn't work for a game,
users are likely to tune out completely out of that game.
To sum it up, in the current world where users switch
between devices, supporting multiple device types
and seamless continuity between them is a must.
But how can you as a developer make sure
that your game offers seamless continuity?
The key prerequisite for that is an authentication system
that has a high success rate to sign in users, which
in turn means low friction.
It is robust and easy to integrate,
and is interoperable with any identity system.
However, such an authentication system
is very difficult to build and integrate
because securing an authentication system
is highly specialized and expensive.
And then username and password systems
are difficult for users to manage,
since they are so very easy to forget.
This also makes setting up a new device an especially risky
moment for users.
At the same time, it's very difficult
to time the right moment when to trigger authentication.
Too early and/or too much friction,
and the user may churn out.
Too late, and you may have missed the window
to provide a seamless continuity experience.
Finally, interoperability with a different identity
system on different platforms is complex.
All of these reasons make it more likely for users
to have suboptimal experience of continuity.
In the best case, this results in high load on your support
services, and in the worst case, it results in lost users.
However, for games published on Google Play,
we have a solution for these problems in Play Game Services.
With PGS, you get an authentication system
that has the security of Google behind it,
very low fiction for users, with only a short configuration
needed before being able to sign into a supported game
with a zero-touch experience.
The same user identity available everywhere where your Google
Play data is available-- that means on the phone, tablet,
Chromebooks, and PC--
allowing you to restore the user's progress no matter
how often they switch between devices.
And finally, modularity, so you can use it
with any other identity system you may be using.
And with the recent launch of PGS v2, things are even better.
Now users are automatically signed in to in-game startup,
so you can rely on having an identity for the user
from the first interaction.
The integration is very simple and it doesn't need
any complicated [INAUDIBLE].
And finally, there are no external dependencies.
The login flow doesn't require extra downloads or installs,
and account creation and login will work out of the box.
I want to also give you an idea of the reach of PGS.
A majority of Android users already have a PGS [INAUDIBLE]..
All these users are users that you
can sign into your PGS-enabled game immediately.
All of these benefits of PGS v2 have led to strong adoption,
and is already used in some very big titles like "Asphalt 9--
Legends," "State of Survival," and "Cookie Run--
OvenBreak."
Just one last point before we move
on to the technical details.
PGS can also bring other benefits to your game
beyond enabling seamless content.
For example, after launching PGS support in the game "Wealthy--
The Age of Merchant," BLANCOZONE NETWORK KOREA
has seen a 24% improvement in early game retention.
This is just one example, and we know every game is different.
So we're looking forward to hearing from you
what other benefits PGS gives to you and your users.
With that, I'll hand it over to Andrew,
who will speak about the actual implementation of PGS
in your game.
ANDREW GIUGLIANO: Thanks, Vlad.
My name is Andrew Giugliano, and I'm a developer advocate
for Android, focusing on helping developers be successful
with Play technologies.
Now, as we mentioned before, PGS is easy to integrate,
has a frictionless login experience for the user,
and can be leveraged within your own identity system
so that your users can seamlessly bring their game
progress across surfaces.
Let's focus on that first point.
In the past, implementing PGS required a lot of code
on the client--
to sign the user in, allow them to manage your account,
and handle sign-outs.
Now we've heard your feedback and we
wanted to make this a better experience.
With PGS v2, sign-in is automatically
triggered without needing extra code,
and retrieving the player's info only takes a few lines of code.
What used to take tens of hundreds of lines of code
is now reduced to just several lines in your client.
Let's take a look at the three steps
to integrate PGS within your game.
First, you'll need to go into the Play Console, which you use
today to distribute your games, among many other features.
There's a dedicated Play Game Services section
within the Console, which will walk you
through the steps needed to configure your PGS project so
that your client code can call our APIs.
Next, you'll need to pull in the Play SDK in your game client.
In this example, we are using Java and Gradle.
However, we also have Native and Unity SDKs
to simplify your developer experience with other setups.
As you see here, you'll pull in the PGS SDK,
specify your game's PGS project ID in the Android manifest,
and finally, instantiate the SDK in your application class.
Finally, on startup in your client code,
you can see if the user successfully
logged into your game, and if so, what their player ID is.
The first block of code here shows a call
to ensure the user's logged in with your game.
If the user chose to decline, we offer an API
to retrigger the sign-in prompt so that you
can have a button in your game menu to log in,
in case your user changes their mind.
Otherwise, if the user is logged in,
you can use a call in the second block
to retrieve their player ID, which
you can use to identify a player across services.
And that's it.
You now have the flow all set up for a user
to sign with your game, and you can retrieve the player ID.
As you'll see later on, you don't
need to worry about handling account management
within your game since the user's PGS account
is managed in the OS settings.
Some next steps that you can take advantage of now
that PGS is in your game are integrating PGS friend lists,
achievements, and leaderboards.
We also offer REST APIs so that you
can verify your PGS login attempts
server-side with Play servers.
Now, we won't cover these in our talk,
but we do recommend reading more at our Developer site.
Next, let's talk about the frictionless user login
experience with PGS and how this will get more users
logged into your game.
Previously, logging in with PGS required the user
to choose their account.
We also used to require external dependencies which
would make creating a profile or sign-in take longer.
Again, we heard your feedback here,
and we wanted to make a better experience.
Now with PGS v2, most existing users
will automatically be logged into PGS v2-enabled games
without having to interact with a prompt.
This means once users opt in, they
will be signed into your game without needing to do anything,
whether it is their first time entering
your game or your 100th.
What's better, users will have the same experience
across services.
And as we discuss more later on, you
can use the user's player ID to automatically
restore their progress across services before they even
enter the game.
Now, onboarding new users is an easy experience.
In the matter of a couple of prompts
and no external dependencies, users can create a new PGS ID.
After this step, they will automatically
be logged into PGS games, as we showed on that last slide.
On mobile, PGS account management
is now in the OS settings.
With this change, your client code
does not need to handle this flow anymore,
and users have a single place to manage their PGS accounts
across different games.
Let's now talk about how PGS can help your game,
even if you have an existing identity system.
You may be asking, why should I use PGS if I already
have an identity system?
And the answer is simple--
with the frictionless experience users
have when logging in with PGS across surfaces,
you will get more users logged into your game.
You can then use a PGS player ID as an identifier
you can link within your own systems
so that when the player enters your game on another surface,
they can be logged in without needing to enter a username
or password, and they can pick up their progress even faster.
On top of this, you'd expect that devices with Play
will have a Google account signed into their device.
Using PGS is a seamless way for a user
to log in across all their games on their device
with a single account.
Then when that user uses the same Google account
to log in on other Android surfaces, such as Chromebook,
Play Games, and Android tablets, they will automatically
port their ID as well.
We've generally found that there are
two approaches you can take when linking the player
ID with your existing identity system.
The first is to create a strong binding between PGS
and your system so that a user can always
expect that their progress is attached to a single PGS
account.
In other words, this is a one-to-one relationship
between PGS and your identity system.
Another is to use a recall strategy
where you can use PGS to recall one
or more accounts the player may have
used from playing your game.
This works best for games where users
tend to use multiple accounts at the same time.
So, for example, if I log in to three different accounts
with your identity system while logged into the same PGS
account, if I logged into that same PGS account
on another platform, your game could
present the three different profile options for me
to move forward with.
As such, this is a one-to-many relationship between PGS
and your identity system.
To recap, PGS is now easier for the developer to integrate
and a better experience for the user.
With PGS, users can now more easily log into your game
across Play surfaces.
And whether you have an existing identity system or not,
PGS can help you create a seamless experience
for your users to restore and play your game.
So integrate PGS today to get more users signed
into your game across multiple devices
and to offer them seamless continuity no matter
how they switch between them.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
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