GREG HARTRELL: My name's Greg Hartrell,
I'm the lead product manager for Google Play Games, and--
DAN GALPIN: I'm Dan Galpin.
I'm a [INAUDIBLE] developer advocate here at Google.
GREG HARTRELL: So we're going to talk to you a little bit
about Google Play Games, our online network,
and a little about preceding some of the growth story
that we heard from Chris [INAUDIBLE].
So Chris told us about the incredible gaming momentum
we have with Android and Google Play.
To recap some of those metrics, we
have over a billion activated Android devices.
And three in four of those Android users
are playing games.
That's a ton of gamers.
We know that developers are reaching
an unprecedented audience of gamers like never before.
And the more interesting thing is
when we take a look at that momentum,
it's helped propel Google Play Games, our online game network,
to tremendous growth.
So we're sharing with you the stat today,
that we've had over 75 million new users who've
joined us in only six months.
So since we launched at Google I/O last year,
we've spoken to many of you who've adopted,
we've spoken to many of our players,
and we're just delighted by these results.
I'd just like to thank-- and Dan and I
would like to thank-- everyone of you for adopting us
and for helping make us this successful in this short period
of time.
We think that this is one of the greatest growth
opportunities for game developers today,
and we'll take you through a little bit of that right now.
So if you step back and look at Google Play Games,
it's basically Google's online game network
with user experiences and services designed
to enhance game play, bring all of these players
together, and in a matter of speaking,
take Android and mobile gaming to the next level.
Many of these services are available cross platform
to developers, through SDKs, through Android, iOS,
and the web.
And for players, they're engaging in these experiences
in-game and through our Play Games app.
But that said, there's a lot more
to these services than just the achievements, leaderboards,
multiplayer, and Cloud save services that we have.
The way to think about Play Games
is, it's a concentrated network of people
who enjoy playing games.
And in an ecosystem this large, it's essential for us
to bring all these people together and help
you connect them to your content.
So for those of you who've adopted Play Games,
we've talked with you, and we've looked at our own data,
and we know some interesting properties about these players.
We know that they're playing longer, they play more often,
and they're more likely to monetize in your title.
So some of you have experienced double-digit bumps
in engagement and retention stats,
or have seen a lift in revenue after launching Play Games.
We know that we're helping many of these games just
reach new heights.
But there's nothing magic about Google Play Games.
It's not like you just integrate the services and magic happens.
It's really more about how do you
use the tool sets to engage these users
and these mobile users that are there?
So you can imagine, in mobile gaming
there's a very diverse audience that you're trying to reach,
and similar to the way that you think
about the thematics of your title,
and what type of audience you're trying to reach,
you also need to think of how these tool sets will resonate
with the different types of players.
So one way to think about them-- and there's
many-- is how interested they are in social-- or just social
openness-- with a spectrum of people
who are not very interested and very high.
So Dan's going to use his best science class
voice to help us understand how Android Labs thinks
about these users.
DAN GALPIN: Here at Android Labs,
we've done extensive research, which
leads us to the conclusion that there
are three fundamental gamer archetypes, the competitor,
achiever, and stealth gamer.
These archetypes can be charted based approximately
on how open they are to social interaction.
At the open end of our scale, the competitor archetype
engages in everything, achievements, leaderboards,
and multiplayer.
They thrive in competitive and deep cooperative experiences.
They own every console, their personal homepage lists
their achievements and scores-- and not just from one network--
they play games on mobile for the same reason that Captain
Kirk climbed mountains in "Star Trek IV"--
because they're there.
Achiever is the other side of the openness spectrum.
They thrive in progression, solving problems, and revealing
story, but they're averse to playing in social situations.
This is the mobile equivalent of the people that
work to earn a million points in "Geometry Wars" without dying.
The people that played "Final Fantasy
VIII" to get the two-minute long Eden Summons.
Like the competitor, these guys are
looking for deeper phone and tablet experiences.
The stealth is a funny persona.
They don't view themselves as a gamer but they play every day.
And while they are less likely to engage
in direct social interactions, they
welcome passive interactions.
This means they can be engaged to help
a friend, or by comparing themselves to another player,
so long as the social interaction is fast
and the impact is immediate.
With these three personas in mind,
I'm going to hand it over to Greg
to cover how Play Games can help you reach each one of them.
GREG HARTRELL: That's fantastic.
I already feel like I'm in fifth grade science class again.
So let's take a look at the competitor
persona in a little bit more depth.
So the toolkit here, are our social and public leaderboards
and our multiplayer capabilities.
And these cater very well to somebody
who wants that competitive and cooperative experience.
When you look at social and public leaderboards,
it's intuitive, this is the classic way
of engaging a competitor's streak.
I think what you see here, is that somebody chasing
their score, their going to try to get
in front of their friends.
And what we found, is that our social leaderboards
are particularly effective in encouraging people
to reach out to their friends, saying
hey, come play this game, and oh, by the way,
try to beat my score.
Moving on to the multiplayer capabilities that we have,
maybe the best example we have most recently,
is from a game called Clumsy Bird.
Clumsy Bird used our real time multiplayer capabilities
to drive an intense amount of social interaction and repeat
game play.
They did this in the form of using our auto-matching system
to create a five-round elimination tournament.
This ended up rewarding players for making it to the end.
And with the auto-matching capability we have,
is really fantastic, because it gives your players
to access to what might be described
as the hidden social graphic or game.
That is people who were playing the game right now,
and these players are getting into games
in seconds, which is a highly-gratifying experience
for this type of user.
We also have an invite system, so Clumsy Bird also
integrates that.
Where I can invite a player like Dan
and ask really penetrating questions like,
how can I beat his score, and how did you
get that fancy hat for your bird?
DAN GALPIN: I think the really cool thing
is that this game really used our services to stand out
from other similar games on the platform.
GREG HARTRELL: To say the least.
OK, so moving on.
We also have turn-based multiplayer intuitive.
That if you have a title that is literally turn-based,
or where game play sessions are played in increments
over many days or many hours, very useful toolkit.
Good to point out in our invite system
that Google will help rank users based
on how frequently you engage with them.
So being able to show you players that you've
played with recently, or people who are actively playing,
helps people get into a game even faster, and appeals,
again, to that competitor persona.
But the growth hack here is interesting.
So if we take a look at our notification system, what
this allows is an opportunity for social discovery
in your game.
So if you've integrated multiplayer,
you automatically get the ability to notify users
through the millions and millions of Android users
that are out there.
And we took this to heart and we've made some changes
to the way that we've done notifications.
Launching in-play services, rolling out this week,
and expanding the way that we think about it.
So we called it priority notifications.
So let's go through an example of how this might work.
So today let's say Dan invites me to a game by default--
he's in my circles-- I would see Dan's face, and the fact
that he wants to play Frozen Front with me,
and my phone would buzz, and I'd see it in the shape.
But let's say I got invited by somebody who is not
in my circles, and they're interested in playing with me.
So in this new rubric, we're going
to be able to silently aggregate these people
in the notification.
And I don't yet know who this user is.
So if I tap on the notification, you'll
see that there's two users.
Dan's on the left in my circles, and I can play a game with him
immediately, and on the right, you
have this handsome devil, who, clearly you
want to play a game with him.
And you can go and see more, and you
can add him to your circles, or play games with him.
And again, if I don't have this game,
I'm taken to the Play Store, I'm converted into a new user,
and that's a little bit of a growth
hack for you using multiplayer games.
OK that's the competitor in a nutshell.
Let's talk about the achiever.
So the toolkit here is pretty simple.
This is the user that's progression oriented.
They're going to complete all the story,
and they're going to earn every achievement
that you put into your game.
Quality achievements are essential here,
and the leader boards have a tendency
of driving this user as well.
But the key message we want to leave with you today
is design great achievements.
And that sounds easy to say, and it's very easy to do,
and we see the titles that do this really well are
seeing a lift in engagement and improving
the retention of their titles.
So let's take for example, a game like "Plague Inc."
For those of you who haven't played "Plague Inc"--
and I would be impressed for those of you in this room that
haven't-- "Plague Inc" is this simulator that allows you
to engineer a virus to destroy all humans.
And if you learned in super villain class,
after you destroy the world, you're
really just supposed to go on vacation, and maybe retire.
But that leaves you out of the opportunities
of all the exotic ways that you can destroy the world.
So as the achiever, I'd be able to look at the achievements
and say, oh, there's other ways for me to go about this.
I can potentially cause World War III, fascinating.
Or I can infect astronauts apparently.
Viruses in space.
This is the most awesome game ever.
DAN GALPIN: This game is awesome.
GREG HARTRELL: OK, so very easy for you to accomplish.
Bottom line is, achievements matter.
We have this Play Games developer practices video.
It's online now.
I think we'll be showing it at a lunch break.
This is where we'd invite you to take a picture of the screen,
get the link.
And for those of you that didn't take a picture,
you can always google it.
OK.
Let's switch a little bit more discovery hacking here.
So by integrating Play Games-- and this appeals
not only to the achievers, but also
to any one of the archetypes-- there
is several ways you can get incremental installs.
So the first and most obvious one, get a great rating.
You have a great title.
It's high quality.
You will see a higher uplift in installs,
and we encourage you to focus on that.
DAN GALPIN: People like Play Games.
GREG HARTRELL: Go figure.
DAN GALPIN: Yeah.
GREG HARTRELL: Next to it is, is when you integrate Play Games,
and this is particularly interesting for the achiever
persona, the store will show different types of badges,
including the fact that his game has achievements.
And that is one little edge that you
can get that allows this user to make the decision
to install and play your game.
Now let's switch over to the Play Games app.
Fascinating feature of this experience
is you can see what your friends are playing.
So if you were to look at my recently-played games,
you would see that I'm playing "Brave Frontier"
and "Robot Unicorn Attack 2"-- fantastic titles--
and you tap through those, they would take you to the Play
Store, and convert those people into new users.
Also in the Play Games app, we have specialized top charts
that show games that have integrated with Play Games,
including a popular multiplayer category.
And the ability to search for those titles within it as well.
And lastly, we announced this week
that we've updated the game categories in the Google Play
Store with 18 new genres.
And that helps people find games that they love in a genre
that they care about.
DAN GALPIN: But the real question
is, how do we approach our stealth gamer?
They appreciate sign-in with Cloud Save,
but we don't really have anything for social discovery
for them, until now.
So we're adding Game Gifts to the list of Google Play Games
services.
Game Gifts is a service that enables users to both send
and ask each for in-game items.
I'm going to go through the basic flow.
So we start off by actually giving UI in the game
to actually send an extra life, and of course, extra lives
look like mushrooms.
And just to show we're honest, here's
the code you would actually execute to do this.
All you do is request a send intent with type gift.
Inside of the intent, you can include
a binary payload, whatever you want,
the lifetime of the gift in days, an icon,
and a description.
Back to our flow.
Google Play Games then displays the UI
to select the player to gift.
I recommend following this example, and gifting me.
The request heads into our cloud and notification
is posted to receiver's device.
They actually get this aggregate view of anyone
who sent them gifts, whether or not
they're actually in their circles,
and then from there they can actually accept the gift.
Now if they don't yet have the game,
then they're brought to Google Play,
and Google Play will go and install the game.
And then they can actually accept the gift,
and this is what it looks like.
You actually end up getting incoming requests
in an unconnected bundle.
And our game helper sample also provides a get request method
to fetch these requests, as in this example.
We also register a request listener,
which means if the game is actually running,
you can actually just get these game requests within the game,
you don't have to direct people into this flow.
And you can accept them, just by handling requests.
And the game should probably display
some UX to allow the gifts to be accepted,
since Play Games does not.
And here's how you actually handle the callback
once you've accepted the request.
Note that the response doesn't actually contain details
about the request, which is why I cashed the request
objects to begin with.
And yes, you use empty blocks is where you'd actually
handle the requests within your game.
OK, so back to our flow.
Now we've accepted the request and we get an extra life!
You can also actually show the inbox request
inside of your game.
So we talked a little bit about gifting,
and that was a pretty complicated flow,
but I actually left something out.
So after you've actually accepted the gift,
we allow you to get the results of the transaction.
And this allows you to do things like trades
within our gifting system.
So this is pretty cool.
Instead of just accepting the life,
you can actually prompt the user and say, hey,
do you want to trade this for some other item?
And sure.
And so if the user accepts that trade,
it'll send a message back, and you
can find out that the item was traded.
And this way you can actually set up complex flows.
You could say, hey, no, I'm not going to accept this item,
but here is my offer.
And you could actually have a complex negotiation scenario
going on between players, all hosted by Play Games.
So now you've made a game that all three archetypes play
and discover using Play Games, which is awesome.
But the next question is, how do you know if I'm successful?
So I'm turning it back over to Greg.
GREG HARTRELL: So to precisely answer
the question of how you're successful,
you need to think about who are these different personas?
And how can I see that I'm engaging them,
and that Play Games is actually making a difference?
So this week, we're launching a new update to the Google Play
developer console, and we call it Enhanced Play Games
Statistics.
What's fascinating about the statistics
for Play Games adopters is, it allows you near-zero effort
analytics by virtue of incorporating Google Play
Games.
It comes in the form of a daily dashboard that you can view,
providing you player and engagement analytics,
for you to better measure the success of your titles
between updates and for the types of content you added.
So let's take a closer look.
OK, that's too close.
Alright.
So for the best game ever, you need the best ever dashboard.
And so we'll do a quick tour here.
What I can see in this best game ever
is a quick, at-a-glance, metrics of recent days of new players,
and active players-- ones that I've
converted into coming back.
I can also get a quick glance at my retention data, which
gives me a quick glance at several days of running
day two averages.
And then I can look at my engagement statistics,
particularly for achievements and leaderboards, achievements
both in terms of what's earning, and the meantime to unlock,
and also leaderboard activity in terms of scores posted.
The dashboard also provides delta metrics,
so I can at a glance quickly determine
whether I'm increasing or decreasing
engagement with my players.
And I can use this in a variety of scenarios,
depending on how I manage my game.
So let's take a look at the player
stats when you dive deep.
This gives you your trend lines for players
who sign in to play games.
And your rubric is, I have new players who are coming in,
I can see which ones are becoming active,
and I can see how I'm retaining them.
So the quintessential scenario here
is, you've just updated your title, your goal of that title
was to improve-- or rather reactivate-- all of your users,
or a large swath of them, and you
could see your trend lines and your active players
to validate whether you've accomplished that.
A more interesting scenario is through player retention.
So this dashboard gives you the ever-important new player
return rate.
And what new player return rate is,
here's the number of people who started playing on this date,
and 1, 2, 7, and 30 days later they came back.
And many of you use this as a key metric
for deciding whether the early game of your title
is compelling or is successful.
And so the use case here, you just
updated your title to compress let's say your tutorial flow,
and maybe enhance some of the things
that you're showing within the first 24-hour period,
with the goal of increasing day two retention.
And so what you would see here on let's say
March 8th, going from March 7th, is you accomplished that goal.
You saw a bump in day two retention as a result,
and you know that your tutorial flow changes were fixed.
And again, this data is all based on Play Games signed-in
users.
Gives you all of this data on a daily basis.
Let's switch over to the engagement analytics.
So this focuses on achievements in leaderboards.
And so if you think about the archetypes
that we talked about earlier, such as the achiever,
and the competitor, let's say that you added
an achievement towards the end of your game
and you can kind of see that this is the one that helps them
get to that very special level that I know
has a ton of content.
I can see if my achiever's actually chasing that,
or whether they're finding things
that are impeding them along the way.
Or if the competitor is, let's say you added a new tournament
mode to your game, you can use the leaderboard
that's backing that tournament to see the number of scores
that are posted, and the velocity of people engaging
in that, to decide whether your tournament system was
successful.
So we're very excited to launch this for all Play Games
adopters.
It's available in the Google Play Developer Console
this week.
We can't wait to see what you do to improve
the metrics of your titles.
OK, so that brings us to the end of our talk.
We're going to do a quick recap, to see what we learned today.
First is, we learned that Play Games is
a highly concentrated network of people who love playing games.
We know that they play longer, they play more often,
and they're more likely to monetize in your title.
We learned about three personas, the achiever, the competitor,
and this stealth gamer.
For the competitor, we have direct social experiences,
and for the achiever we have progression mechanics.
And for the stealth gamer, who is
interested in passive social experiences,
we've launched Game Gifts, which we're rolling out
with the next Play services update over the next week.
We learned a number of growth hacking techniques,
using Google Play Store and Google Play Games,
such as the top charts in the Games app
and seeing what people are playing.
And through multiplayer notifications,
you can convert new users who have not
played the game by virtue of social discovery.
And last, but certainly not least,
we give you tools to measure your success through the Google
Play Developer Console with enhanced Play Games statistics
for all of your signed-in users.
And with that, that brings us to the end of our talk.
Dan and I would like to thank you for joining us.
We have a fantastic lineup for Google Developer Day today,
and we'll be taking questions outside in the back,
after this.
Thank you very much.
DAN GALPIN: Thank you.