(upbeat music)
Hi, my name is Yafit Becher, a Product Manager on Google Play,
working on delivery solutions for game developers.
My name is Andrew Giugliano, a partner developer advocate
working to help developers be successful on Google Play.
My name is Vitor Baccetti, a product manager at Google Play
working on app distribution.
We want to talk today about ways that Play can optimize the delivery of your game
and improve the user’s experience, so let’s get started.
Users have limited attention spans and want to play right away,
so it’s not surprising that any wait after discovery
will hurt your acquisition funnel.
In fact, we know at Google Play that long waits are the number one reason
for cancellations and lower engagement.
At the same time, users expect an optimal game experience
on any device they use, so you need to serve
higher quality assets suited for many devices which increases your game size.
But as game downloads get larger, users spend more time waiting
before they are allowed to start playing.
In Google Play, we are continuously improving our app distribution features
so you can let your players into the game sooner
without sacrificing the quality of your game play.
In this talk, we’ll provide further details about Play as you Download,
a new feature for Android 12 that was announced in our keynote.
Next we’ll deep dive into Play Asset Delivery which we launched in 2020,
including some new features built on top of it,
and interesting partner stories.
Let’s start by talking about Play as you Download.
Built into the core of Android 12,
Play as you Download allows users to get in gameplay in seconds instead of minutes.
We’re not talking about demos or tutorials but the true experience within your game.
Even better, Android and Play optimize downloads
without extensive changes to your underlying implementation, maximizing your ROI.
We shared a demo earlier today during the keynote
and we’re bringing another example during the session
showing massively improved user experience.
On the left-hand side, you can see the current experience in Play Store,
where we download the entire game before users can open it.
On the right, you can see the new Play as you Download experience in Android 12
where users can quickly open a game after we download its most essential content.
Play will download the remaining assets,
but this task will happen in the background without blocking users unnecessarily.
As you can see, games can be opened in seconds with this new technology,
even if their full downloads are hundreds of megabytes.
That’s a big improvement for users in a critical moment of the acquisition funnel.
We’re very excited about this new feature.
We’re making this happen through innovations across the distribution stack
for the operating system kernel in Android,
all the way to Google Play Service.
And most importantly, the innovation won’t require you
to change your game’s implementation.
These automatic optimizations are generated through a four-step process.
One: starting when you upload a new version of the game.
At that point we don't know how to optimize it yet,
and we serve the full download to users, as it happens today.
Two: when users open the game for the first time,
Google Play can tell which parts of the binary
are needed during gameplay.
That’s possible due to Android innovation
in particular, a new file system called IncFS.
Three: next we analyze and aggregate such data,
find a general trend and patterns across the Android ecosystem.
Then four: Finally, we have enough volume of data
and we can enable optimizations for new users
that have much smaller downloads.
This is a big change to game distribution
and to ensure a high quality experience for games and developers,
we're testing with a number of partners.
During Android 12 beta, we worked with many studios from indies to majors.
We’re excited about the opportunities ahead.
In particular, we are very thrilled about the positive impact.
Play as you Download is at least twice as fast as normal downloads of this cohort.
You may be wondering now what you need to do to test
this new feature for your own game.
It’s really simple. We have three prerequisites.
One, enable Play Signing for your game in the Play console,
Two, use the App Bundle, and, if relevant, Play Asset Delivery.
And three, run recent versions of Ad SDKs also if relevant.
Next, you can sign up on g.co/play/asyoudownload.
We're working hard to extend this feature to more developers
as fast as we can, and we will keep you up-to-date.
Thank you for your attention. And now, Andrew and Yafit
will talk about Play Asset Delivery’s trajectory since launch and its future.
-Thank you, Vitor.
Play as you download is built on top of Play Asset Delivery,
which we launched a year ago in order to address
the unique challenges of large game distribution.
PAD expands the unbundled format and offers free dynamic delivery
of all your game assets.
With PAD, your user spends less time waiting
and more time playing as assets can be delivered and updated
in the background by Play before the games even open.
On Android 12 and above, games using PAD
can automatically benefit from Play as you Download,
offering the ideal install-to-play user experience.
PAD has seen great success with developers
and many top titles are already using it.
We’ll talk about the many benefits our partners are seeing with PAD
and share some unique ways they have used it to optimize their game experience.
We'll also go through some of the unique and exciting
value-add features built on top of it.
In case you missed our announcement last year let’s quickly recap the benefits of PAD.
First, PAD extends the Android App Bundle & lets you publish a single artifact to play,
including all the coding resources that your game needs.
Secondly, when you use PAD to deliver your game’s assets, it keeps them up-to-date
just like with your game’s binary.
So when users open the game, they have the first binary and assets
with no additional wait for updating resources.
Play’s auto updates takes care of Delta Batching,
delivering only the bytes that have changed
from the version the user has installed on their device.
Last but not least are PAD’s delivery modes that let you control
when and how Play delivers your game’s assets.
Let’s take a closer look.
The traditional delivery option includes assets as part of the initial install.
And with Install Time delivery, you can deliver up to 1G of game assets
as part of the initial game installation.
With on-demand deliver, you can also choose to have your assets delivered upon request
throughout the game's life cycle,
so your assets will be downloaded only when they're needed.
The third option is Fast Follow, triggering a download
as soon as the initial installation completes
and while the open button on the Play Store is enabled.
Now that we’ve seen the immediate benefits of PAD,
let’s see some value-added features built on top of it
and the less expected benefits you can get with PAD.
One of the reasons we built PAD is to help mitigate
Android device fragmentation.
Texture Compression Format Targeting, now in general availability,
enables efficient use of device hardware without bloating your game size.
With PAD, you can package multiple sets of assets
compressed by different compression formats
and rely on Play to automatically detect the compression format
supported by the device
and then send the most appropriate one to the requesting device,
keeping your install size smaller and not wasting storage space
with assets that are never in use.
Cat Daddy Games, one of 2K’s studios,
recently switched to Play Asset Delivery and adopted
Texture Compression Format Targeting.
It allowed improved graphic quality on devices that support ASTC
without increasing the app size for other devices.
They were happy the integration was easy and required no changes.
They said, “We just added the additional data file to our build and Google does the rest.”
The Texture Compression Format Support
is only one part of the picture, as the same assets
do not run equally well on different devices.
To fully optimize game performance on a wide range of devices,
you’re likely to want to serve different quality levels of your assets.
As things stand now, this would increase your game size
and create extra overhead to determine
which assets are the most appropriate at runtime.
To help with this, we are working on a new feature called Device Tier Targeting.
Currently in closed beta, Device Tier Targeting will allow you to serve
the optimal set of assets to each device.
So you can create different quality levels of assets and assign them into distinct tiers
for each asset pack.
You then tell us which devices belong to each tier,
segmenting devices by the RAM size, device model,
or another hardware trait you might choose to segment them by.
And that’s it. Play takes care of the rest,
delivering the appropriate set of assets to the corresponding device tier
and allowing you to give your users
the optimal experience for the device they’re on.
Okay, now that we’ve covered the best features,
let’s change gears and go back to the basics of PAD.
As you hopefully have heard,
starting from August 2021, we intend to require new apps and games
to publish with the new Android App Bundle on Google Play.
In the same timeframe, we’re planning to deprecate the legacy APK expansion files,
commonly known as OBBs.
While existing apps and games using OBBs will be allowed to keep using it,
we encourage you to migrate to Play Asset Delivery
our preferred and standard way to publish apps larger than 150 megabytes.
Migrating from OBB to PAD’s Install Time Delivery
is trivial and as simple as switching to a different build target.
It’s supported on recent versions of the Grade plugin,
Unreal game engine, and our plugin for Unity.
Unity games not using Unity’s Asset Bundles can now also easily migrate to PAD
using the latest plug-in version.
The plugin take cares of everything for you
and will produce a single artifact that you can publish in the Play Store.
With their game Best Fiends, Seriously were hitting the OBB size limit.
They turned to PAD and were surprised it took only a couple of days
to complete the integration, packaging their Unity AssetBundles
into Install Time asset packs.
They found that Install Time eliminates the overhead of using OBBS,
allowing their creative team freedom to deliver a high quality assets
that make a great game experience for their users.
As Ilkka Halila, Seriously CTO, saidm
“Working with PAD is super smooth, and it just works.”
Speaking about installation experience,
we know many of you care a lot about the download confirmation warnings
users see when they attempt to install a large app.
Many developers prefer to avoid this message because they believe it is causing churn.
First, It's important to remember that we only show this warning
when the user is not on wi-fi and when the initial install size
is larger than 150 megabytes.
Games using Fast Follow delivery won’t see this message in store
if their initial install size is kept below 150 megabytes.
As in cases where the user is not on wi-fi,
the additional download is deferred to app startup time.
With this, the Initial Install Time download won't record download confirmation.
When the user opens the game,
if the remaining download is larger than 150 megabytes
and they’re still not on wi-fi, they will then be asked
to approve that the additional Fast Follow download.
Another important trade-off to keep in mind is between your over-the-wire size,
storage size, and loading performance.
Some games use sub-optimal compression formats
to stay below 150 megabytes,
but then it means that they need to uncompress those assets on device,
which increases storage space and may hurt load times.
With Install Time Delivery letting you serve up to 1 GB of assets up front,
you’ll make the best trade-off for your game & choose the best option for users.
Supercell, who recently migrated to Play Asset Delivery,
optimized these trade-offs and was able to cut their game size on-disk by half
while only slightly increasing its download size.
As we mentioned, one benefits of using PAD is its built-in support for updates,
including robust features, such as delta patching and auto updates,
all leveraging the power of Play.
This helps keep users on the latest version of your game,
optimizes the size needed for updates,
and reduces the overhead work needed from you.
CD Projekt RED was able to reduce their update size by 90%
after switching to Play Asset Delivery.
Updates that used to take over 2 GB now typically take only a few hundred MB
by moving their assets to Fast Follow delivery.
Using Fast Follow and background downloads,
they saw average reduction of idle wait time of eight minutes.
As a result of improvement for end users they saw 10% improvement of user updates
and a 4.X reduction in uninstalls on day one of the new version release.
We hope this has shown how much we care about optimizing your game distribution
and our commitment to improving your users’ experience.
Please, take full advantage of our delivery features and get your users playing sooner
without compromising the quality of your game.
If you haven’t already, you should get started with Play Asset Delivery
and tap into the many advanced delivery features it enables,
including the new Play as you Download we are all super excited about.
Thank you for joining us.
(upbeat music)