BILL BILODEAU: I just wanted to spend
a couple minutes talking about partner developer relations.
We are your developer advocates, so we
work with partners, hence the term partner developer
relations.
So partners meaning game developers like you.
And we're all engineers.
We're on the technical side of things.
We're not on the business side of things.
And all of us-- pretty much all of us
have worked with game companies before in the past,
so we have some understanding of the difficulties
that you have to go through.
We're located around the world in various locations
in North America, India, and APAC.
And as I mentioned, we work closely with partners.
Sometimes we make visits to partners
and actually work on-site to help with performance
or help debug problems.
We also have meetings and emails with partners.
Also, you should consider us your first point of contact
for technical questions.
Another thing we do is to tell developers
at events such as this about new technology related
to games from Google.
And one of the most important things that we do
is gather feedback from developers on how
we can improve our products.
So I encourage you to all give us
honest feedback on how you think we can improve,
and feel free to do it today, especially, is a good time.
Go ahead and ask questions or make suggestions
during the meetings today.
One of the things we've been doing recently
is focusing on high fidelity games.
And this is because we're seeing this trend because
of the improvement in mobile hardware
that's capable of running games that traditionally
are on consoles or PCs.
And the thing is, this really stresses the system,
requires a lot of the system.
And so things like Vulkan are important for rendering
to get the most performance.
So one of the things I did was I looked
and saw how many devices actually support Vulkan.
And you can do this by going into the Play
Store in the device catalog.
And you can see there's about 400 devices--
there's probably more now--
and those are device models that support Vulkan.
And this turns out to be about 427 million,
getting close to half a billion devices now,
that support Vulkan.
Now, this doesn't mean all of those devices
are capable of running your game.
There could be problems where the hardware isn't fast enough,
or there could be problems with the driver quality.
So this is something that you would need to test.
As I mentioned, these high fidelity games
are really pushing the limits, and so our job
is, we want to improve that ecosystem,
make things better for developers
of these types of games.
So today, for example, in these sessions,
we're going to be talking about Vulkan, Samsung, and Crytek.
We're going to be talking about their experience
of working with Vulkan and trying to optimize.
And then, because these games are more complex than, like,
a casual game, they require good tools
for debugging and profiling.
And so we have sessions on Android Studio,
and GAPID, and Systrace.
These are tools for debugging and profiling.
We recognize that these are important to have,
and we're going to continue to improve these tools.
Also, because of the wide variety of devices out there,
and capability of devices, and driver quality,
testing is very important for these types of games.
So we have a session on automated testing
by Netease, which should help improve
the time required for testing.
And also, Plarium is going to talk
about using device catalog in the Play Console
for helping them to select which devices to run their games on.
Last thing I want to mention is we
are going to have office hours this week during I/O, Wednesday
and Thursday.
I have a QR code here.
You can grab that.
This will link to a site where you can schedule office hours
with us, one-hour slots.
Also, you can check your email.
I think I sent out something about office hours.
And on the event website, there's a link to it.
Or you can just talk to me and I'll
schedule something for you.
It'll be held at a building on Crittenden Lane, which
is right across the street from Shoreline Amphitheatre, so
not too far from I/O.