(upbeat music)
Hi, everyone. Really excited to have you tune in
and watch the Google for Games Summit talks today.
I’m really excited to talk to you a little bit about GameSnacks,
which is Google’s new HTML5 web gaming platform,
and talk to you about all the exciting things
that we've seen in the growth of HTML5 web gaming
around the world over the last few years, and what we’re doing as Google
to help developers and users succeed with discovering and playing HTML5 games.
A bit about me:
My name is Ani, one of the co-founders of the GameSnacks team
and the general manager of the team.
I’m really excited to share a bit more about,
first, what we've seen over the past few years
when it comes to HTML5 gaming all around the world
and how it’s been growing;
second, an overview of what we're trying to do at Google
to help developers and players succeed;
and third, what the usage on GameSnacks has looked like today.
Now, I wanna start just by setting some context
which is that Google, at its core, is a web company.
We invest in making the web great across a variety of different experiences
and content verticals to help users and developers succeed
with easily discovering and sharing great content on this platform.
And when people think about web gaming specifically,
often especially in markets like the US and in Europe,
when I mentioned the phrase web gaming,
people often think about desktop-era web gaming sites
from 15 or 20 years ago built on top of Flash.
You know, websites that evoke fond memories,
like Addicting Games and Miniclip and Kongregate,
all of which ushered in a great era of web gaming many years ago.
As mobile has become the primary way that users interact
with content in the web over the last 10 years,
many people think that web gaming has been on the decline
because Flash, which powered a lot of these great sites,
does not render on mobile.
But a lot of this has changed over the last three years in particular,
due to the rise of gaming capabilities that are possible to be delivered
and built directly on top of the web platform itself.
So this is what we refer to when we talk about modern HTML5 games.
It’s high-quality games you can build directly
using platform capabilities on the web.
A lot of this has been enabled by the rise of APIs like WebGL
that make it possible for web browsers,
including mobile web browsers, to tap into the GPU
to deliver and render high-performance graphics for users,
to create games that look like the ones that you see here,
that look and feel almost like native games, but are built directly on the web.
And what are the benefits of HTML5 games?
Why are they great?
Well, on the player side,
they work well on a variety of different network conditions and device constraints,
which is relevant to players around the world,
especially in emerging markets, like India and Indonesia and Nigeria,
where many users are coming online to the internet for the first time,
often on lower-end devices, low-memory devices, on flaky networks
where they might not have the bandwidth to go and install large games
from the App Store and the Play Store. And so the web and HTML5 gaming
is a great delivery mechanism for gaming content to them.
But they also offer a bunch of great advantages for developers.
They offer them flexibility in terms of how they can get these games out to their users.
The first is that they’re cross-platform. HTML5 games work wherever the web works,
including on iOS, on Android, on desktop,
on TVs, on cars.
Developers only need to build a game once and it works everywhere.
The second is that,
because it's all ultimately built on top of the web,
these games are linkable.
Each one is associated with a unique URL,
which gives developers a variety of different distribution options.
They can host games directly on their site, and users can come to their site.
They can host it on web portals,
or they can distribute it inside of other apps that users already use.
And that third capability,
that ability to distribute it inside of services that users already use,
speaks to the embeddability of the web.
Developers can build these games in one context
and that game can be portably embedded inside
a variety of different apps and services that users are already using.
But we think one of the key challenges that's holding back HTML5 gaming,
that's preventing the ecosystem from truly flourishing,
is that it's not very clear for a lot of players and users
where they should actually go to discover these HTML5 games.
What is the go-to destination to find and play high-quality HTML5 games?
That’s exactly the problem that we’re trying to solve with GameSnacks.
Our mission is to make HTML5 games universally accessible
to users all around the world.
And so we connect games built by amazing game developers all around the world
to apps and services that users are already using day in and day out.
Many of which are Google apps.
Some of which are built by our partners to actually get these games out to users.
So now what I’m gonna do is talk a little bit about
both sides of this equation.
We’ll start by talking a bit about
what the experience for game developers looks like
when interacting with GameSnacks,
then we'll talk about what it looks like from the integration side,
how these games are actually distributed to users
and how users find them and discover them.
And then we’ll talk about monetization at the end
and how we're helping developers succeed
with building viable businesses on top of GameSnacks.
First, start with the game developer side.
So, we work with over 30 game developers around the world today
to get their games onto GameSnacks.
And these games have been adapted for audiences all around the world
and a variety of different device constraints and network conditions.
The first is that we pay a lot of attention to ensure these games are actually localized
to markets that they're targeted for.
For example, a significant part of our user base is in India.
And we spent a lot of time and care
to make sure that we have a high-quality content catalog for Indian audiences.
For example, Bolly Beat.
The second is that we spent a lot of time making sure
that these games are fast loading in a variety of network conditions.
We work closely with game developers to optimize the initial game bundle
to make sure that they’re small as possible,
and reuse features on the web platform as much as possible
rather than adding unnecessary cruft.
And we also work with them to be intelligent about how they load assets in the game
so that they defer loading of future levels or future images or large sound files
until users absolutely need to encounter them.
And the third is that we’ve really pushed the envelope
on the graphics capabilities of these games and make sure that these games look and feel
almost like native games when users are playing them,
so that they can't tell a difference
between whether it’s a web game or a native game.
We now have over a hundred games on the platform,
and you can check out the full catalog at gamesnacks.com.
We've tried to keep the experience as simple as possible
for game developers in terms of how they actually work
with GameSnacks to get their games onto the platform.
They start by adding the GameSnacks SDK,
which is a few lines of JavaScript that they include into their games.
Then they upload them to our platform, after which we begin a QA process
to ensure that the games work well across a bunch of different platforms,
iOS, Android and desktop, and are also bug free.
Then, once they’ve passed the QA process, we host them on our platform.
And finally, we get them distributed and integrated
into a variety of different apps and services without game developers having to do a thing.
All they have to do is focus on what they know and love doing best,
which is building a high-quality game.
So, now let’s talk a little bit about how these integrations work
and how we actually get these games out to users.
It starts with the Embed API,
which is flexible infrastructure that we’ve built
that allows us to very quickly spin up new integrations.
The Embed API allows these games built by game developers
to be embedded anywhere: iOS, Android, tablets, and desktop.
It also enables customization
so that the games can be laid out in a way that feels native
to the app that they're integrated into.
For example, the search and discovery experience can be reskinned to
look like the native app UI and can also, over time, be adapted
to include platform features that are natively provided
by the app or website that they’re integrated into.
And third, the Embed API works
with a variety of different Google apps and partner apps.
So let's talk a little bit about specific examples
of where the Embed API has been integrated today and what it looks like
from a user perspective to actually be able to discover these games.
One example is with Chrome.
So we partnered closely with the Google Chrome team
to bring GameSnacks and web gaming to Chrome users on Android.
So, today, if you are a user of Chrome on Android
in India, Indonesia, Nigeria or Kenya,
straight from the New Tab page on Chrome,
you can discover a high-quality list of web games that are all powered by GameSnacks
because many of these users might not know exactly where to go
on the web when it comes to finding games to play.
And so this, we think, is a relatively straightforward integration
that the Embed API supports, but just shows one example
of how users can actually encounter these games
directly from the New Tab page of a web browser.
The second integration I wanna talk about is with Google Discover.
So Discover is a feed of curated content that's tied and personalized
according to a user’s interests that’s very easily accessible
straight from the home screen of a user's Android device.
So when they swipe left from the home screen, they can see this Discover feed of content.
And among the various different types of content
that’s viewable on Discover, one of them is now web games,
which we think makes a lot of sense for the Discover context,
as users are looking to kill a few minutes here and there in the middle of their day.
And so, for users who are interested in a particular category of gaming,
maybe a user who’s interested in puzzle games would want to discover a puzzle game,
or a user interested in card games might wanna discover Solitaire,
or a user interested in arcade games might wanna discover Tiger Run, as pictured here.
They can very easily find it straight from within the Discover feed
and instantly start playing without having to leave the Discover app.
So this highlights one of the flexibilities of web gaming
in terms of how it can easily be embedded inside of the underlying app
without users having to actually leave the app.
Third, I wanna highlight what our integration with the Assistant looks like.
So any user who uses the Assistant on Android around the world
can simply say to the Assistant, “Okay, Google, play a game,”
and you will discover a list of GameSnacks web games
that's accessible straight from the Assistant.
Again, users can tap in and start playing without actually leaving the Assistant,
but all fully delivered by the web.
So yet another example of what a web-powered integration could look like.
And finally I wanna highlight what GameSnacks inside of a partner app might look like.
So we’ve been working with the Gojek team,
which started off as a ride-hailing app in Indonesia,
but has since expanded into a variety of different services
that they offer to users in Indonesia, like e-commerce, like food delivery,
and increasingly, entertainment.
So we've worked closely with them to add a game center into the Gojek app.
You can see what it looks like here where users, straight from the Gojek app,
can click into the GoGame section, which is ultimately powered by GameSnacks.
One of the nice things about this is that it’s been reskinned
to look and feel like the Gojek app so that, from a user perspective,
a Gojek user feels right at home when they’re playing GameSnacks games
within the app, but all again delivered by the web.
The best part, from a game developer perspective,
is they didn’t need to worry about these integrations.
They didn’t need to worry about what it look like in Chrome,
in Discover, in the Assistant, or in Gojek.
They just had to build their game, and we took care of the rest
in terms of actually getting those games out to users on these different surfaces.
We recently announced that, across all of these different integrations,
millions of people from around the world play GameSnacks games every month,
but we think we’re just getting starting.
We’re excited to keep enabling & spinning up more and more of these integrations
to meet users where they are to help them play.
Finally, I wanna talk just a little bit about monetization.
We’re still in the very early days of this, but it hopefully paints a bit of a vision
of where we can go with monetizing this platform
and ultimately helping game developers succeed.
So we've been working very closely with the AdSense team at Google,
to pioneer high-quality web gaming ad formats
both for users and for game developers.
And what we're doing is working on enabling game formats
that are natively integrated inside of the game itself,
that are less intrusive to users, better respect their attention
so the ads are surfaced at the right moment during a game,
they don’t interrupt the gameplay or distract from core gameplay experience,
and a lot more engaging than what’s out there on the web today.
Specifically the two formats we’re working on right now that are in beta
are, one, interstitial ads, which are full-screen, immersive video ads
that appear after natural break points in a game.
So perhaps when a user has failed a level or after the end of a game session,
that's interstitial ads.
We've also been working with them debuting rewarded ads,
which are opt-in based experiences that users can optionally choose to engage in
at certain moments in a game, where, in exchange for watching a video,
they can collect a reward that helps them perform better within the game.
And across the native gaming ecosystem, these formats have been there for a while
and have been shown to perform a lot better than other types of ad formats,
and we’re excited to bring them to the web.
And we're working on making it very simple
to integrate these AdSense ads into GameSnacks games,
so that, using that same GameSnacks SDK that game developers are already using,
they can easily enable rewarded ads and interstitial ads
as part of the gameplay experience.
And this shows here what such an example could look like
inside one of our games, Lake Jump on GameSnacks,
where users, after they lose a level in Lake Jump,
can optionally choose to watch a video through a rewarded ad,
and, if they do, can get another attempt at playing the game.
We’re excited to start testing this with some of our early game development partners
over the next couple quarters
and then move forward with monetization more broadly
in the later part of this year or early next year.
So that’s GameSnacks in a nutshell
and a bit about our mission to make HTML5 gaming successful
for users all around the world,
to make it really easy for them to discover these games,
and to help game developers succeed too,
to help them reach more users and players all around the world
and ultimately build viable businesses on top of our platform.
If you have any questions about anything that I’ve said,
if you have ideas for things we could be working on we might not have covered,
if you have feedback for things we should be doing,
or if you wanna partner with us either as a game developer
to get your game onto our platform and reach more users,
or as an app developer that wants to easily add a game section into your app
without having to worry about the nuances of the gaming industry,
please reach out.
My email address is right there, and I would love to hear from you.
Thank you so much for watching. I hope you have a great rest of the summit.
(upbeat music)