GREG HARTRELL: Hi, I'm Greg.
And here are some highlights we shared at the Google
for Games Developers Summit.
Let's talk about some important product updates
and announcements, including new tools
to help you build great Android games,
updates to help you connect with more players,
and reach higher with larger screens.
Let's start with quality.
App quality is the foundation of everything
that we do at Android and Google Play.
Android users expect a great experience
from the apps and games they download.
We've recently launched a number of new features
in Android vitals to make it easier to monitor and act
on any issues.
First, core vital metrics have been
updated with user-perceived crash rates
and ANR rates and the ability to view the quality
bar per phone model.
Second, you'll now also receive warnings
if there's a risk that your app's visibility will
be affected.
And third, starting today, Android vitals
will include frame rates for games
in the form of measuring slow sessions,
so you can understand when your game is
visually janky across the device ecosystem.
We've also introduced a range of new tools and services
to help you improve the quality of your game.
Today, we're announcing support of symbolication for Android
ANRs when using the NDK.
After all, ANRs account for a significant number
of unintended application exits on Android.
Additionally, we've improved support for Unity stack traces,
including Unity on-demand fatal events.
And lastly, Crashlytics now supports memory debugging
for GWP-ASan-enabled games.
This will help you diagnose the trickiest memory problems
and security vulnerabilities.
All of these improvements make Crashlytics an important part
of your quality toolkit.
So we're taking the Android Game Development Kit further
to help you with game stability and performance.
First, we started introducing a suite of adaptability APIs
to help your game respond to the changing device
performance and different thermal scenarios.
With the Android Dynamic Performance Framework,
there's a hinting library that can send signals about
your workload to the CPU so that your game can tap
into performance when you need it and save power when you
don't.
There's also a thermal API to listen during runtime when
the CPU is about to thermally throttle, then adjust
your workloads like your game's level of detail to smooth
performance without overheating the device.
We use this on the Pixel phone system
UI to substantially improve frame drops.
And a growing number of OEM devices and game engines
will soon begin supporting these adaptive performance features.
So stay tuned.
Lastly, on the tools side, we've introduced
profile guided optimization in our Visual Studio
extension, which will help you automatically
optimize commonly used code paths, like your games use.
I mentioned earlier that building and connecting
with your players is key to the success for many games.
That's why we're creating more opportunities
to help you find new players or engage and reacquire
existing ones.
Custom store listings are another powerful tool
that allow you to differentiate your store detail pages.
You can help boost conversions by creating up
to 50 custom store listings with customized screenshots,
pre-registration status, languages, and more.
We've now introduced inactive custom store listings
so you can target new or churned users,
including deep links with a different story about how
to come back to your game.
Lastly, we have to mention the growing
large-screen cross-platform gaming
opportunity, which is stronger than ever
on Android and Google Play.
The beauty of Android is that your one game
can be adapted easily to reach all these screens.
And we've made a lot of progress to make
these screens great for players to experience games on them.
We're also going further with Google Play Games for PC.
Last year, we launched to incredible reception
in 13 countries, including South Korea, the United States,
and Taiwan.
With a catalog of top-tier games and over 10 billion
monthly sessions on mobile, our users
have met this product with enthusiasm
for its high-quality, high-performance emulation
and cross-screen gameplay.
Thank you to all of our early adopters,
and get ready for more updates this year.
We are expanding to more regions and including more games
in the coming quarter.
And I am pleased to announce we'll
be expanding to Japan in the next couple of months.
This opportunity is amazing for the next wave of games
coming to the platform.
Speaking of which, I'm pleased to announce several games that
will be joining the lineup in the coming weeks and months.
Starting today, we're making it much easier
to join Google Play Games for PC with your existing mobile
build-- no need to recompile for x86 right away.
Fully optimized games are the best for users
and qualify for unique cross-platform marketing
and promotion.
But if you're still working on those optimizations
and want to reach players faster,
we now offer the option to submit your mobile build
in the meantime.
You can let us know you want to participate at the link
that you see here.
That brings us to the end of Play
and Android's announcements.
Thank you to everyone for listening.
And remember, you must gather your party
before venturing forth.
Check out the video playlist you see here
for additional sessions on everything
we spoke about today.
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