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..
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