CHRIS YERGA: Good morning, San Francisco.
Hello.
We applauded them out, man.
Thanks so much, ladies and gentleman here
in the audience, and everyone on YouTube globally,
for joining us here today.
I am Chris Yerga.
And it's my pleasure to do the kick-off here today.
So let's talk about kick-offs, though, right?
Generally speaking, kick-offs don't really
have a whole lot of content.
It's more about introducing the players
and flipping coins and maybe every once
in awhile, a jet flies over or something like that.
But there isn't really a whole lot of football going on.
And today is kind of similar.
So what I want you guys to do is think about the next 10 minutes
you're going to have with me as an amuse-bouche for your mind
to try to get yourself ready for the jam
packed day that we have coming up for you,
because it is crazy.
We have 14 separate talks coming up after this one
covering all aspects of Android gaming
with some awesome speakers across Google.
And I am giving you my personal guarantee.
There is not a drum solo in the bunch.
We are playing all the hits today.
So use those bathroom breaks carefully.
Now, what I am going to use my time to do
is talk to you a little bit about some context here
for the history of multiplayer gaming.
And I think there's really no better place
to start than the 12th century.
Now, when we think about the 12th century, some of us
think about secret societies and Freemasons
and all that kind of stuff.
But then, just as now, they loved to game.
Certainly, twitch games were very popular there.
And they played it hardcore.
No respawns at all.
But what I would really want to talk to you
about right now is a particularly
famous and important turn-based multiplayer match
that happened between two monarchs at the time.
So we have here on the left Henry I of Britain versus Louis
VI-- that's 10 King Louis before the ones
that I know anything about-- of France.
And this isn't a metaphor or anything.
These guys actually did play a turn-based multiplayer game
across a very long distance.
So we want to talk a little bit about what kind of architecture
they used.
So clearly, in order to play a game
over that kind of distance, you need
some sort of network transport.
And I know these guys are loaded.
So they had the best technology of the day.
It was a little bit high latency.
And from time to time, it could be lossy.
But no problem-- they had a network transport.
And you can deal with those things at the protocol level,
and so they had a protocol as well.
Now, we can kind of think of it as the moral equivalent
of a wire protocol.
And what it was, was essentially messages
that they would deliver to each other on ships
with coded instructions on how to mutate the game states
and keep a game session going.
Now, of course, this immediately introduces a third problem
that they had to solve, which is somehow,
you need to keep a view of the game state
both in England and France and keep it synchronized.
And so they had a solution to that, too,
which was to keep chess boards at each side.
And then you take the pieces and then
send a responding move when the time came.
So obviously, what we're talking about here
is correspondence chess.
And even though it happened nearly 1,000 years ago,
the way they solved this problem,
in sort of broad strokes, looked very much like the way
that we build systems today to solve the same problems.
But the thing that I find far more interesting about it
is that the game itself and the players who played it also
responded to ecosystem dynamics in a way that's
very similar to how people respond today.
So for example, there was a huge increase
in correspondence chess after 1840,
when flat rate data plans arrived in Europe.
So you might ask yourself what does a flat rate data plan
look like in the 1800s?
And it looks like this thing.
So this is called the penny black stamp.
It's the first stamp that allowed flat rate postage
delivery to a fairly ubiquitous service area in a way
that we think of stamps today.
And it fundamentally revolutionized
sending messages at a distance.
And so prior to this, it was complicated.
The receiver would pay, and it was
based on how far things traveled and stuff like that.
So when the market provided a more economical way to do this,
the gamers rushed in and filled the vacuum.
Similarly, the game itself adapted
to technology drivers of the time.
So when the telegraph came around,
games of correspondence chess immediately
started using this more low latency transport mechanism.
And similarly, when radio came along,
that shared the latency characteristics
but also meant that no wires were needed.
Soon after, games of chess where one or more of the parties
were on ships started being recorded in the literature.
And the final thing, also, is that people
love to tweak stuff, right?
So there was a lot of protocol optimization
that happened as well, from the 1600s, where
you have a whole sentence to describe a chess move,
down to a few hundred years ago, it got actually pretty compact,
and there was actually even variants of this
for being transmitted over telegraph or radio
or other sorts of transport.
So the thing that I want you to take away from this
is one really important fact, which
is that the desire to game is ubiquitous.
The only thing that really changes the size of the market
is how available it is to people.
So 1,000 years ago, you needed to be
a monarch with a flotilla of boats to play a game of chess
with someone at a distance.
But as the bar to that reduces and reduces,
the gamers always rush in, just like water
finding the lowest spot in a room.
It's almost like physics or math.
The desire to game is completely ubiquitous.
And these same dynamics have played out
across our own lifetimes.
Actually-- OK.
Well, this was during my lifetime, at least.
I'm not sure if everyone here has the same shared experience.
But in the '80s, there was this great age of arcade cabinets
and arcades as a location-based entertainment solution.
So people could have these awesome immersive,
for the time, gaming experiences.
The problem was there's only one cabinet for lots of people,
and you had to drive down there.
But it was a big step up.
And then of course, when the home console and PC
era came on, it turned that whole thing on its head.
So now, you're only sharing the game
console between a couple people in the family.
And it's right there in your house
where you could use it not all the time,
but certainly every day.
And of course, that all has changed to the point
now, where in many regions of the world,
for all practical purposes, it's one to one devices to gamers.
Everybody has it with them all the time.
And so it's then expanded the market exponentially.
And I think we should really take a moment
to think about how unique this point of time is
and how rich this opportunity is for us.
And what it's really done is it's created this world where
everyone is a gamer, no matter where you live.
So if you're riding the subway in Korea,
chances are you're playing a game on your mobile phone.
But if not, you might be looking up
at the ads for mobile games on the monitors that
are in the subway.
Or if you're in Seattle, you might see a giant Angry Bird
hanging from the Space Needle.
And this is a particularly salient example for me,
because a few years ago, when my daughter was maybe five
and my mom was in her 80s, they had a conversation
about Angry Birds.
They were both completely aware of Angry Birds.
They played the game.
And I think it really speaks to the ubiquity of gaming
and how it's really touching everyone
but is also showing up everywhere.
In Japan, we actually have vending machines
where you can go get games for your Android device.
There's a sushi restaurant I eat at.
And if you look at the top row there,
you'll see that every single seat has a monitor.
That's because while you're sitting there for 30 minutes,
it would be a shame if you didn't get a chance
to play a game on the monitor against the computer.
So every once in a while, it beeps,
and you play some Rochambeau or whatever.
Gaming is everywhere.
It's completely pervasive in our culture.
And so what that has created is a ton
of momentum for the market, which
creates a ton of opportunity for all of us here today.
So think about it.
We have over a billion activated Android devices,
and three in four Android users are playing games
on those devices.
These are huge numbers.
And we also have had huge momentum for Google Play Games
Services.
We launched it just around six months ago,
and we have 75 million users actively using Play Games
Services now and incredible momentum going forward.
So with that backdrop, I want to take you real quickly
through some of the stuff you're going to be hearing today.
This is a pictorial version of it.
Basically, we think of it in a couple steps here.
You've got to build your app, right?
You're going to build with Play Games
Services and Google's cloud.
You then want to connect up to players and to people
who want to experience your game.
So you can connect up with millions of users in the Play
store or create online communities
on YouTube or with Google Play Games app.
Also, you want to experiment.
And so we got some great talks from Google Analytics talking
about some of the ways that you can get data and let data drive
your decisions about how to make your gaming
experiences great, which also helps you
with monetization, which is our next topic here.
Clearly, we're all in it for the art,
but it's kind of nice if you don't
have to have a day job in addition to it.
So we provide an ever expanding set of ways
to monetize your apps, obviously through ad supported models
via AdMob and in ever increasing ways
to allow users to pay in the Google Play Store.
And of course, we'll be talking a little bit
about stuff that allows you to explore
some new frontiers and new platforms,
like the one you see in front of you, and maybe some fun stuff,
some blobby Jell-O that sort of bounces around
and some other new capabilities that we're
going to unleash on you guys.
So with that context of this massive opportunity
and a lot of really sharp tools we're
going to give you to help capitalize on that opportunity,
I thank you for your time today.
And it's my pleasure to hand it over
to-- you're familiar with this term of,
oh, that's a tough act to follow.
These guys are a tough act to precede.
When we rehearsed yesterday, I realized
I had to up my game a little bit.
So I'm going to hand over to the dynamic duo.
Thank you so much for your time this morning,
and enjoy the day.