(upbeat music)
Hello, my name is Lauren Mytton, and I’m a product manager in Google Play.
Today I'm going to talk to you about
how you can make your game more successful on Google Play.
I'll do this by first explaining the concept of quality reach
and how it underpins your game’s success.
Then I’ll be introducing two new tools to help you plan and optimize for it.
Let's start with quality reach.
There are billions of people on Google Play
distributed across the world on many different devices.
When you build and launch a game on Google Play,
you have the potential to become relevant
in the lives of an enormous number of people.
How do you realize that potential?
The foundations for your game’s success on Google Play
are your game's reach and its quality.
Reach is about whether a player can access your game,
starting with whether they can install it.
Quality is about whether they’ll have a good experience whilst playing it.
To unlock the opportunity in any single user on Google Play, you need both.
You need reach so a potential user can access your game
and you need quality so they will also have a good technical experience when playing it.
You can think of this as quality reach.
When you have quality reach, your game's development,
marketing budgets and growth strategy can be lined up to reinforce each other.
In other words, you acquire users for whom your game performs well
and because your game performs well for these users,
your engagement and retention strategies will be more effective
and have a higher return on investment.
But what if you have poor quality reach?
This is the situation where users can install your game
but do not experience good technical quality when playing it.
In this scenario, you can inadvertently acquire users
whom you will not be able to engage and retain.
If you're spending to acquire these users,
this is obviously a poor use of your acquisition budget,
but the consequences go beyond that.
If enough users experience poor quality and leave low ratings for your game,
this will hurt your ability to acquire
even the users for whom your game does perform well
since Android vitals and store ratings may affect your games discoverability
and conversion in the Play Store.
This is why reach and quality are so foundational to the success of your game.
Another scenario that you want to keep an eye on is missed reach.
This is where users could theoretically have a good experience,
but your game does not reach them.
Whilst this does not prevent you from achieving success
with the users that do have quality reach, it still limits your game scale
and potentially also its return on investment.
So your foundation for success on Google Play starts with quality reach.
The broader your quality reach,
the more you are leveraging the scale of Google Play.
Think of quality reach as the width of your upper funnel.
Then you build on this foundation by lining up your acquisition
and growth strategies behind your quality reach
for sustainable engagement, monetization, and retention.
How do you put this into practice?
There are three types of decision that determine your quality reach.
Devices: This is what device specs you build for and target;
geographies: This is about what countries, languages, or localization you offer;
testing and optimization: This is what you plan for and prioritize
during development and pre-launch.
I started by explaining why quality reach is so important.
These decisions are what determine your quality reach.
These decisions are themselves very important.
These decisions are also distributed across people and time.
For example, country targeting may be more of a business decision,
whilst device specs or optimization priorities could be a more technical one
and you might start with the device decision long before you make a geographical one.
This is worth calling out because it can affect your ability
to get these decisions to line up.
Another feature of these decisions
is that you make them more than once per game.
You make them during the course of developing and publishing your game for the first time,
but you make them again with every new game release.
You also need to be thinking about them even outside your game release cycle
because whether or not your game is changing, the Play ecosystem certainly is.
So these decisions are a core and ongoing component
of developing and maintaining a game on Google Play.
Finally, these decisions are hard.
Play has huge scale and diversity both technically and geographically.
This can make it difficult to understand what it will take to reach more users
and the business case for doing so.
For example, suppose you're a developer in South Korea
who wants to expand to Western Europe.
What devices are relevant?
Could you launch in some countries first with minimal investment?
What's the right level of investment?
Another example: You’re an indie developer in the US
who wants to get more from your existing game.
What additional testing or optimization should you consider,
and what's the potential upside?
Is it worth addressing issues with certain device specs
or are you better off excluding those devices?
The more that your game pushes devices to their limits
and the more widely you export it to take advantage of the scale of Google Play
the harder these decisions become.
To address these challenges,
we're launching a new section in the Google Play Console
called Reach and Devices.
Reach and Devices is a data and insights tool
that helps you to make better decisions about devices, geographies,
and testing and optimization across the entire life cycle of your game
in order to maximize your quality reach on Google Play.
The tool achieves this by helping you to understand
or predict the distribution of your users
and your issues across the Google Play ecosystem.
Think about every decision you've made about devices,
geographies, min spec, language support, and so on.
They all come down to answering these two questions:
Where are my users? Where are my issues?
Reach and Devices takes data about your app and its peers and presents it in new ways
to help you answer these questions
and making it easier to get all the relevant teams
in your organization on the same page.
Let me walk you through some of the features and benefits.
The tool focuses on helping you understand your users and issues,
so we give you the distribution and trends for both.
We’ve started with install metrics, crash rate, and ANR rate metrics,
and there’s more to come.
You can explore your user and issue distributions
across a number of different dimensions,
including some that are particularly important for games:
System on Chip, OpenGL and Vulkan, again, with more to come.
You can compare your own data with peers to spot opportunities.
You can also use this peer data to plan for quality reach for your next game
before you start development.
And because we know games don’t always start global or even end up global,
we give you country filters for more precise launch and expansion planning.
Finally, for maximum flexibility, you can export all of this data
to join it with other data that you may have and for additional bespoke analysis.
We've had great feedback from developers
who have been trialing Reach and Devices in closed beta.
They've got value from it in many ways across both business and technical teams,
including resource allocation,
root cause analysis,
and device targeting decisions.
I hope this has made you keen to check it out today
and explore what it could do for you.
To get started, go to the Play Console and find it in the left-hand nav.
We’ve also put a link to further reading on this slide
and in the description below this video.
So I’ve talked about Reach and Devices,
which we built to help you plan for quality reach,
but no matter how much planning you do,
it’s hard to catch all issues before you launch,
particularly if your game is demanding.
So you also need to tools to identify and address poor quality reach.
When you do see reach without quality,
one potential action is to turn off the reach.
In other words, reduce the audience for your game.
However, this also reduces your game’s potential.
You can use Reach and Devices to understand the trade-offs with making this decision,
but let's assume that this is your last resort.
Your first step is therefore to understand
what it would take to convert this reach from poor to good quality.
This means you need to establish what issues are involved
and how to address them.
The two main types of technical issues
that you may be facing are stability and performance issues.
For stability issues, Android vitals is a great starting point
and many of you are using it today to track and troubleshoot your crashes and ANRs.
There are also indirect ways to identify poor quality reach.
For example, user feedback is always a good starting point.
Under-performance in your business metrics could be another clue.
Reach and Devices can come in useful here
since it allows you to compare your user distribution to your peers.
If you see significant differences, one potential driver could be quality.
What about performance issues?
You can think about two types of performance issue:
issues in your game that affect all users
and issues that affect certain device specs only.
Ideally, you’d have eliminated both types of issue before releasing your game
and you should check out Scott's talk on the Android Game Development Kit
to learn more about the tools we recommend for this.
But as we’ve already discussed, it can be hard to catch everything,
particularly device-specific issues,
because there’s a limit to how much device testing you can do locally.
This is why we built a dedicated tool for game performance in the field,
Android Performance Tuner, which launched last year.
Let me give you a brief reminder if you’re not using it yet,
especially because a lot has happened in the past year.
The goal of Android Performance Tuner is to help you optimize game performance
across all devices at scale.
Last year we launched with frame rate metrics,
enhanced by quality levels and game annotations that you set yourselves.
This is powered by the Android Game SDK
and shows up in the Play Console as part of Android vitals.
With Android Performance Tuner,
you can identify game-specific issues in the field
by looking at the performance of your game annotations
and you can also identify device-specific issues
where your device is on the wrong quality level.
As I’m sure you know, the best quality level for any device model
is the highest one on which the device will still perform well,
not necessarily the highest level you have and also not necessarily your lowest,
because if you go to high, performance suffers,
but go too low, and your users don’t get the best possible experience of your game.
But when you have thousands of device models to consider,
it's a lot of work to optimize them all.
Android Performance Tuner is also designed to solve this problem
by enabling you to work with device models at scale.
There's growing evidence that frame rate has a material impact on retention
and we've got some examples of developers who are already seeing impact.
Peaksel were able to see that two of their game levels
had considerably slower performance that was affecting users.
SMOKOKO has also found it useful for getting more out of their game.
To use Android Performance Tuner, you need to integrate the Android Game SDK.
This is anything from a couple of hours work to a day,
depending on whether you can use our plugin for Unity
or if you need to do a custom integration.
And as of today, when you do that integration you now get a bonus,
not only frame rate, but also loading time.
Alongside frame rate, loading time is a key element of user experience
and can have significant impact on your quality reach.
APT loading time enables you to understand what loading time targets to set,
measure your performance, and narrow down the root cause of issues,
particularly game and device issues.
You can track every type of loading:
the loading time for the first time the game is run,
a cold load where there’s no existing process and everything has to load from scratch,
warm loading where some parts of your game are already in memory,
and inter-level loading where the user transitions between game levels.
You can also see if specific levels in your game are causing problems using annotations.
These are the same annotations that are used by APT for frame rate,
so you only have to do them once.
The feature I'm probably most excited about is this one,
tying loading times back to user behavior
so that you can set targets and prioritize your efforts
based on not only performance impact, but also business impact.
Our early feedback is very encouraging
and we believe that the combination of frame rate and loading time metrics
should make APT a key part of your game's toolkit
for quality reach and success on Play.
Loading time hits general availability today so please do check it out.
Get started from the Play Console
or learn more about it at the link in the slide,
which you can also find below this video.
I started this talk with the concept of quality reach
and why it is the foundation of your game’s success on Play.
Then I introduced two new products,
first, Reach and Devices, which helps you to plan for success
by making better decisions across the entire lifecycle
of your game to maximize your quality reach on Play;
and second, loading time in Android Performance Tuner,
which helps you optimize for success by giving you the ability
to tackle poor quality reach at scale in a complex device ecosystem.
I really hope you’ll find these useful and impactful for your game’s success.
Do give them a try and let us know how you get on.
Thank you for listening.
(upbeat music)