DAN GALPIN: So I wanted to begin.
My job is basically to be awake this early in the morning.
I'm usually very funny when I haven't had much sleep.
And this is always an exciting week, the week of IO.
So I actually wrote my name in the notes,
just so I'd remember to say them.
Because this is usually a time when
we're just running around, trying to get everything
ready for tomorrow.
And this is always a really fun thing to do,
to meet with you guys today.
And so I'm really excited that Bill asked me to be here.
I've been doing this for a really long time.
I've been working to make Android development better,
delivering some modestly memorable presentations,
and occasionally, maybe more memorable looks over the years.
I particularly like the Jean Valjean look
I have on the left, over there.
So the first thing I like to do is summarize all the things
that I thought were cool about the day we had at GDC.
And so how many people, by a show of hands,
actually attended and saw all of our GDC sessions?
All right.
Well, that's usually about what I expected.
That's why I do this.
And I grouped these to kind of help myself.
So we talked about a lot of things
about what Google Play is doing.
So I'll put my Google Play hat on.
We mentioned that in the last 12 months,
the number of Android users who installed a game more than
doubled, compared to the previous year,
and 40% of that growth is coming from these emerging
markets, such as Brazil, India, Indonesia, and Mexico.
We recognize that because about half of mobile gamers
are women we kicked off an initiative to celebrate
and empower women as players and creators.
We did a lot of stuff inside the store
to actually improve the way that people find games.
We improved search on play with personalization,
such as the search refinements you
see on the left and recommendations on the right.
Nice!
That is because I'm running a dev version.
I swear, hilarious.
This is what happens when you have to run
the unstable version of Chrome.
[LAUGHTER]
All right.
I have no idea what's going to happen there.
That was pretty cool.
This is why live presentations are really fun.
I am going to try to kill everything
that's not important.
And I'm hoping that won't happen again.
But, if it does, we'll roll with it.
All right, let's go back.
I thought this would be so cool!
I did this last year on my Chromebook
running the latest version, but this is just, uh--
all right.
Let me pull that off and start over again.
Where was I?
I was talking about something about Google Play, I remember.
AUDIENCE: You said better search.
DAN GALPIN: Yeah, better search.
We had-- let me try this one more time.
That's amazing.
Thank you all for putting up with me.
And this-- real fun.
Maybe next time I'll actually--
oh, no!
Now it's all-- this is turned back on?
All right, that's OK.
AUDIENCE: You want to switch to this?
DAN GALPIN: Yeah, maybe I should--
Joe, why don't you put it up on the laptop.
We'll switch over once I--
give me two seconds here.
SPEAKER 1: Yeah, sure.
DAN GALPIN: OK.
We might do a switch in between.
If it crashes again, then I'm going to switch over to that.
This does not happen on the release versions, by the way.
Trust me.
Our software's perfect.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: Will it happen on my machine?
DAN GALPIN: Well, the nice thing is
I could move to another machine really quickly.
This is why I should have redundant machines,
clearly, when I'm doing this.
All right, let's go back.
All right, blah blah blah, lots of animations about IO
that are probably making it run out of memory, hands,
play updates.
We're going with lots of expansion.
We're doing some cool stuff with search, personalized search.
One of the things we've done is we've
actually elevated games as its own destination,
in Google Play.
And that's really important because it's
a foundation for creating a lot of experiences
in the story that are unique to games--
such as more immersive recommendations,
like showing trailers or screenshots of actual gameplay.
And we also want to give users a lot more control on how
they explore the catalog.
And one of the things that I'm particularly excited about
is that we now have a premium section, which is highlighting
only paid games.
And we launched that in Q4, and we're refreshing it regularly.
And this is also really good, because, as you all know,
we actually have strikethrough sale pricing now.
So it's a good way for users to go and find this content
that they really want.
And we see a lot of engagement with visitors going deeper
into the page, looking at premium content.
Within our recommendations, we're also clearly highlighting
the best of the catalog.
And one of the major focuses of this year
is actually creating new editorial experiences,
including this rich, long-form content
that explains to users actually what we love about the games.
So not only do you see editors' choice,
but you actually see a couple of things
about why we actually did that.
And these articles are now live in 17 countries.
And discovering new games is really important
not just to developers but to gamers.
And so similar to the way we did with premium,
we actually rolled out a section dedicated
to high-quality new games.
And this is pretty cool.
This is a preregistration feature.
And this is called Milestone Rewards, here,
for preregistration-- which is pretty awesome.
So this is a way in which we're incentivizing people
to actually go and preregister for games.
And that is really great.
It also should be a destination for people to find out
about the games they have.
We spend so much time in live ops trying to drive people back
to content.
That's the way the game world works now.
And so we've actually started to highlight major in-game events
and these live operations to the way
we're doing store featuring.
And they're exploring a lot of ways to use live ops.
And this has been a pilot program for several months,
and we're seeing promising results.
And so hopefully more of you will get to take part of it.
One of the things we're also piloting
is these updates to the detailed pages, which is pretty cool.
So this will actually change depending on
whether or not the user actually has the game installed.
So you'll actually see things that are new and interesting
that are more important.
You already have the game installed,
and you may not have run it for a while.
Or, if you are going to install it, potentially
then you'll see things that'll actually
be more attractive, like videos and stuff like that.
So once again, it's trying to personalize the store,
trying to get people to go and reengage with content
through the Play Store.
We also fully redesigned the Play Games app,
which looks really nice.
And this allows users to really launch
the games they've installed.
And we've added a number of game reengagement features.
And so in addition to tracking, leaderboards, and achievements,
users can now see live ops, related news, and game YouTube
videos.
And we also have a new arcade--
prominently features this tag browsing experience--
to help people find their favorite game,
which is pretty cool.
And these updates are all leading
to a lot of user engagement.
And that's very important as we continue to invest
in this surface this year.
And we also added this little thing that maybe you have seen
called Google Play Instant, which is really, really fun
to play with.
And I highly recommend trying it out.
And when you click Try Now, you actually
get the native application.
So if you've played this with Clash, it's really cool.
It's a great experience.
And you get an option to install.
So you get a whole bunch of levels.
A lot of these games give you a lot of gameplay
and then really, really drive the ability for people to very,
very quickly jump into games and install them right away.
So those are all the promotion things
we're doing-- those that help people discover
games, those that help people reengage in content.
We're also doing a lot of things with testing on Play.
This is something I'm really excited about.
We have internal test tracks.
So one of the challenges, obviously, is you upload--
it goes through a process before it actually goes live.
With internal test track, with 100 users,
things go live very, very quickly.
So you can iterate really, really rapidly.
You don't have to wait for Google Play
to spend a lot of time staging things and going
through your content.
Which is great-- makes it really fast to use play.
And I think this is going to really help people.
We also have country targeting per track now,
which is awesome.
So if you haven't used this, I'm sure that you'll love it.
Because this is something that people
have been asking us for forever.
So I'm really excited about that.
And this is something that's coming soon, I think.
I'm not sure exactly when it's coming soon,
but this actually allows you to create prerecorded demo loops
and use them for prelaunch report, which is pretty slick.
You'll see you'll get crash and performance metrics, including
frames per second.
And this will hopefully allow you
to discover issues even faster and launch
with more confidence.
I talked a bit about ARcore and what we're doing there.
It's currently compatible with a lot of devices, which is great,
and more are coming, on the way.
We have a lot of partners involved with ARcore,
bringing the power of AR to game developers.
Which is something that I think is going to be pretty fun.
And one of the things that's great
is it's actually coming to China.
So we're actually working to make ARcore work in China,
actually making sure that the product is
available through these app stores in China--
with Huawei, Xiaomi, and Samsung.
We also have native SDKs for popular IEs,
whether you're using Android Studio or Unity or--
I don't really think of those as being IDEs,
but this is what their slide said, I swear.
We also have this thing called Poly.
How many people know about Poly?
This is a product we have to actually allow people
to build and browse 3D assets.
So you can find all sorts of stuff
on there, from the landing model of a space shuttle,
to apparently a mustache over in the corner.
And what's really cool about Poly
is that it actually allows you to build these
in VR, which is pretty slick.
And we also added an API.
So literally, you can go to Poly,
and your app can actually pull assets.
Most of these assets are Creative Commons license
for free.
You can just use them everywhere.
And it's really a great way to get started.
If you're prototyping games, it's an awesome thing to have.
Or if you want to have user-generated content
and you want to have a source for that,
this could be pretty fun.
So I'm excited about that.
We also announced Google Maps Gaming,
which is a pretty big deal.
So I have much prettier slides here--
hopefully they won't crash--
which goes through a little bit of the kind of things
you can do.
You can actually game in the real world.
You can completely customize this game world
with all sorts of-- fill parks with trees, turn rivers
into lava flows.
You can customize textures or swap out
entire features for prefabs to create
this kind of world-scale environment
that's true to the look and feel of your game.
So it really is pretty awesome.
I've been excited that we're announcing this--
we've launched this, I should say.
And you can also design gameplay around real places.
So you can actually drive your players to popular places,
take them off the beaten path.
And we actually help you find great places
for your unique gameplay anywhere in the world.
And, of course, you can deliver these at global scale
because it's running on Google's infrastructure.
So that should give you a little bit of peace of mind.
We've done a lot of stuff with Firebase for game developers,
too.
You know, probably, as you see, Firebase
includes all of these things.
I'm not going to talk about all of them
because I have, like, five minutes.
But this is our mobile development platform.
It's a single SDK that combines tons and tons of stuff.
And they really work together well.
Probably the feature that's most useful, other than maybe
Crashlytics, is Google Analytics for Firebase.
This product has really, really grown a lot, recently.
I don't know if you've played with it.
It has fantastic real-time support now.
It's wonderful, when you're going and debugging,
to see the analytics, that analytics data flowing in
really quickly.
And if you're selling a premium game,
it's really important, of course, to understand--
or a freemium game-- to really understand,
really important to understand how people
are engaging with your content.
And you can measure all this behavior at no cost to you.
We added this Predictions API.
This is something we released in beta last year.
And this actually allows you to-- this
builds dynamic user groups based upon predicted behavior, which
is pretty slick.
So you can actually then target these groups
using Firebase Cloud Messaging and a product called
Remote Config.
And out of the box you can find predictions
for users who are predicted to soft churn, users
who are predicted to not churn, spend or not spend--
all that sort of thing.
Which, I think, is really important.
We also, as I said, allow you to experiment with these users
with Remote Config.
So in this case, this is for Mecha Hamster,
which is one of our samples.
But you can see how this works.
Depending on whether someone is going to churn
or whether someone is a dedicated player,
we can offer them different incentives to continue playing.
And you can use it to change any parameters in your game--
like UI, ad placement, difficulty,
whatever you can imagine.
And out of the box we actually have this web-based composer
for notifications.
We also have a Rest API, so you can integrate Firebase Cloud
Messaging into tools that you maintain.
And we also have rewarded ad formats.
Yay!
So that's really great.
Obviously, we have rewarded playables, which
involves try before you buy.
And we also have rewarded with multiple options.
So this gives the ability to watch an ad
and then choose kind of what reward the user's going to get.
And we know this is important.
We know that ads are important for developers
to make sure they're monetizing a lot of these players that
are very dedicated.
We also have this open-bidding beta that we're doing,
which takes the promise of monetization to the next level,
allows people to actually--
allows network partners to bid for inventory simultaneously
and in real time.
So that is pretty cool!
And then the final thing I wanted
to mention that we talked about is that we've been really
working on making Google Cloud work really, really
fast for people that are doing things like real-time PvP.
And so Dragon Ball Legends announced that they
are using it for that.
And I thought that was pretty cool,
so I thought I'd end with that for my component of the slides
and leave Bill to come up here and tell us
a little bit about what he does with partner-developer
relations and what they do.
So hopefully this will continue to work for him.
So thank you, everyone.
[APPLAUSE]