Hi, everyone, thanks for joining us.
We're excited to talk about our new product, Google Play Games on PC.
Our goal is to help you expand your reach,
engagement and ROI by distributing your games easily across
mobile, tablets, Chromebooks
and now Windows PCs with our new offering.
My name is Arjun Dayal, and I'm the Product Lead
for Google Play Games.
I'm excited to be partnering with Shala Seo and Neil Garde,
who will be providing context on the multi-platform gaming opportunity,
our new customer experience,
and our developer requirement to participate in our new program.
Let's jump in.
At Google Play, our goal is to make our products and services
work better together and fit naturally into
the lives of our players.
Today, players have access to a multitude of devices capable of running games,
but many times it's very difficult or impossible to continue
a gaming experience from one device to the next.
Often, progress and purchases do not transfer across devices,
and players have to restart games from scratch on a new device,
losing months or even years of progress, which is incredibly frustrating.
And on the game development side,
we know it's not easy to support additional platforms and devices
when your code base, engine, tools, and testing process
might have to drastically change to support a multi-platform world.
And yet when we look at the latest data,
there's incredible growth in multi-platform gaming in the last few years.
There are over 1.3 billion PC gamers around the world today,
with 54 percent of US mobile gamers also being PC gamers.
Globally, over a billion players are playing games
on both their mobile devices and their PCs,
which presents a unique opportunity for developers.
The player interest and desire is growing rapidly,
so our mission was to build a great product that helps make gaming enjoyable
on more devices for players and distribution simple for developers.
With Google Play games on PC, we've built a seamless and delightful experience
for players to jump into great games across all their devices.
With this product, you could jump into a solo race in Asphalt9 Legends
on your Android phone,
check in on your club members in the afternoon on your Android tablet
and wrap up with an epic multiplayer face off at night on your Windows PC,
all without losing any of your progress or achievements.
Everything just works like you would want it to.
And we've made finding and discovering great games a breeze,
with our Windows Desktop Client.
We've designed an approachable, easy to use interface
to jump into your favorites and uncover new must-haves.
Seamless sign-in with your play game services profile
ensures all game progress and purchases are automatically carried over for every game.
And for developers, the benefits of bringing your games to Windows PCs
with Google Play games are clear.
We focus on simplifying the submission process
so developers can publish wants and play everywhere.
The Play developer console you already work with allows you
to do all this in one place.
We know safety and security are important,
so we built a trusted and secure runtime.
And with the new Play Integrity API,
you'll have protections against common forms of cheating and tampering.
And finally, we're unlocking new end-to-end user acquisition
capabilities for PCs,
so you can expand your marketing reach beyond mobile and hit your ROI targets
across all platforms.
We're very excited about our new platform
and all it has to offer for developers and players.
Shala will now walk you through more global market
trends and customer insights to help you better understand
the multi-platform opportunity for your business.
Thanks Arjun.
Hi, I'm Shala, a Strategic Partner Development Manager at Google Play.
Before we show you the product we've built,
I'd like to share more market trends
and customer feedback to help you better understand why
this opportunity is exciting.
Today, there are three billion users playing games across the globe.
The gaming population continues to grow thanks to better internet infrastructure,
affordable smartphones and mobile data plans.
Asia Pacific is also home to three of the top four gaming markets,
which together have more than half of the world's online population.
APAC is also mobile first market.
Many users find it convenient to discover and enjoy games
on mobile devices, while passionate gamers still own
multiple gaming devices, including consoles and PCs.
To satisfy the large population of players,
game developers in APAC,
having been introducing more high-fidelity games
across PC and mobile.
Our consumer research, conducted last year, showed that
the gamers in APAC have the highest weekly average playtime of all regions
at 17.4 hours per week.
Gaming has become an important part of users life in APAC.
We're also curious about how users are spending their time
across devices they own.
Through another internal Google research, we asked gamers between the ages of 13 and 54
which devices they use to play video games in the past month.
The results show that many gamers are spending time on multiple devices,
often splitting their time across smartphone, PC and console.
For players already playing both mobile and PC games,
76% of them had a strong interest in playing their mobile games on a PC
as an extension of the experience.
This is an important proof point that helped us better understand
the benefits of providing a seamless solution to play mobile games on a PC.
To better understand what motivates gamers to play games on multiple platforms,
Google researchers gathered data from thousands of players
and learned there are three major motivations for wanting to play a mobile game on a PC.
The first motivation is approachability.
Because mobile games were originally designed to be enjoyed on the go,
their rules and environments are less complex,
so it's easier to quickly jump in and make progress.
The ability to use a mouse and keyboard
can also make some mobile games more fun.
While playing, some gamers also like to switch over to different surfaces
such as YouTube and Discord to get tips on gameplay,
chat with their friends or livestream their current game sessions.
So multitasking is the second motivation we heard consistently from the users.
The third motivation is that it's much easier to immerse yourself in a game
when that game is on a larger screen,
where all of the details are easy to see and navigate.
So you can really dive into the game's environment,
and PC players can leverage the full power of their machine
to play games with excellent performance.
To reflect those growing user trends,
some game developers are already moving fast
and are beginning to publish their games
When we surveyed game developers in Korea last year,
two thirds responded that they're already investing in
multi-platform gaming experiences,
and they aim to provide a stable and safe gameplay environment for users.
We also heard from these developer that users who play on more platforms
are more engaged and lead to much greater LTV over time.
This can really help your business grow.
These trends and data confirm that multi-platform is an important
market expansion opportunity for Google Play to provide
to improve the experiences for our developers and players.
To make sure that we satisfy the gamers expectations
and improve their gaming experience,
we have launched a beta of Google Play games
in three major APAC markets, including Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong,
so we can learn more about what the players enjoy about
the experience as expand more globally.
We look forward to working with all of you soon.
Now I'd like to invite Neil to show you
the demo of Google Play Games on PC
and talk more about the technical requirements.
- Thanks, Shala. Hi, I'm Neil, a Product Manager at Google Play,
and I'm going to show you a quick demo of Google Play Games on PC.
I'll walk you through the experience of finding and playing
your first game on PC.
Starting off, you'll see that we're in our
Google Play Games Desktop Client on PC.
This is a standalone application you can download directly from the web.
On the homepage,
we're bringing a great discovery experience to life.
After you sign in with your Play Games Services profile,
we have several ways for you to find a great game to play.
The first is with our rich cards and clusters,
which highlight the best parts of the game experience
The continue playing cluster on the right hand side,
lets me quickly return to games that I previously played on PC.
When I scroll down, I can browse our other featured games
and hit the browse button at the bottom to see our full content library.
We have several games available today,
and we've focused on bringing the best quality games into our catalog.
Here, I'll click on Summoners War, one of my favorite games to play on my phone.
On the store listing for this game,
I see more rich content, formats, reviews and more.
Installing a game on Google Play Games is as simple as hitting the install button
and launching it directly from the client
with no need to download any new exe files.
Everything happens in one place.
Once Summoner's War downloads
I'll hit play to watch in full screen.
One of the first things I see
is that I'm automatically signed in with my Play Games Services profile.
By being signed in, my game progress and purchases from my Android device are
automatically restored, resulting in a frictionless experience
in my first time playing this game on PC.
As a game loads, I'm going to hit Shift Tab to open the game menu,
where I can refresh myself on the controls
and make sure my gameplay settings are good to go.
You might notice the experience feels a lot like a native PC game,
but under the hood we're actually running an Android binary on
the emulation technology we've developed from a player's perspective.
They're playing this game just like they would play
any other native game on PC.
I'm ready to get started with gameplay.
We're really excited about this new experience
and we hope our players enjoy it too.
In addition to the games you saw in that video,
I want to highlight more of our development partners
and their games available in our catalog.
These games are played b hundreds of millions of active Android users.
Our partners have managed to bring these games to PC
without the major effort typically required to support a new platform.
As we heard from Playrix who have published three different games on the platform so far,
Google Play Games has enabled them to bring their games to PC
at a fraction of the development and maintenance overhead
that would normally come with the new platform.
And with that, I want to dive into how you can optimize your Android game for PC.
First, I'll give an overview of our technical requirements,
then share how we're making it easier to bring your existing game onto PCs.
At a high level, we have four main requirements to bring your game to PC.
These are required for any game on the platform,
and we've developed these guidelines based on what we found
matters the most to players on PCs.
All games will need mouse and keyboard support
and to be optimized for a larger screen size.
For example, this might involve using higher quality assets
and scaling your in-game UI to fit the larger screen.
They'll also be required to sync players' game progress
across devices so they can seamlessly sign in
and have continuity of play between mobile and PC,
as you saw with Summoner's War in the product demo.
Lastly, to fully optimize your game for PC, we require Android x86 support
for the best possible performance.
This format is supported by many popular game engines
including Unity, Unreal Engine and Cocos Creator.
Earlier, I talked about how we've made it much easier
We consistently hear from game developers that distributing
to a new platform can require a lot of resources,
including upfront deployment work,
and ongoing effort to run QA and maintain a new code base.
We've taken extra care to ensure that you can now
distribute your game to all of these form factors while
maintaining a single Android binary codebase.
Instead of developing a new format,
you can optimize your game for the new form factor
and immediately distribute to phones, tablets, PCs or Chromebooks.
While these may seem like a lot of new devices,
we've designed the guidelines so that by optimizing for Google Play Games,
you can distribute your game not only to PCs, but also tablets and Chromebooks.
This is a market of 250 million devices
where we see a continually growing number of gamers.
A great bonus from optimizing your game for PCs.
In addition we've created a number of tools to make it easier to
optimize your game.
When playing a game with keyboard and mouse controls for the first time,
learning the controls can be really important.
For this, we've developed a lightweight input controls SD
to help you share controls with players through our in-game menu.
Second, we have an updated Play Game Services SDK
to help support continuity of play between devices.
You may already be using Play Game Services,
but with our updated V2 SDK, you can now support automatic sign-in
with just a few lines of code.
Lastly, we have a new Play integrity API
that is currently available in beta.
This helps you detect attempts to cheat or tamper with your game on PC
and ensure that your game is only running in the environments you published to.
You can learn more by visiting our website.
To recap, we see PCs as an exciting new market to expand your audience.
We've put in a lot of effort to build a great product experience,
make the development and distribution seamless as possible.
We're excited about the future of Google Play Games
and what it means for the Play ecosystem.
If you're interested in bringing your Android game to PC,
visit Google.com/Play/GooglePlayGames today
to learn more and express interest in joining the beta.
Thank you so much, and we hope you enjoyed the session.