Introducing Google Play game services
By Greg Hartrell,
Lead Product Manager
We love to talk about games at Google. Especially the old ones, like Pac-man, Pitfall and
Frogger. Since those classics, games have changed a lot. They’ve moved from that clunky box in
your living room to the screen that you carry with you in your pocket wherever you go. They’re
mobile, they’re social, and they’re an important part of Google Play.
Today, we’re launching Google Play game services, a core part of building a gaming platform
for the next generation of games. These services help you make your games more social, with
achievements, leaderboards, and multiplayer, as well as more powerful, storing game saves and
settings in the cloud. They are available on Android, and many on iOS or any other connected
device. By building on Google’s strengths in mobile and cloud services, you can focus on what
you’re good at as game developers: creating great gaming experiences for your users.
With game services, you can incorporate:
- Achievements that increase engagement and promote
different styles of play.
- Social and public leaderboards that seamlessly use Google+
circles to track high scores across friends and across the world.
- Cloud saves that provide a simple and streamlined storage API to
store game saves and settings. Now players never have to replay Level 1 again.
- Real-time multiplayer for easy addition of cooperative or
competitive game play on Android devices. Using Google+ Circles, a game can have up to 4
simultaneous friends or auto-matched players in a game session together with support for
additional players coming soon.
Several great Android games are already using these new game services, including
World of
Goo,
Super Stickman
Golf 2,
Beach Buggy
Blitz,
Kingdom
Rush,
Eternity Warriors
2, and
Osmos.
And many more titles launch today as well:
Google Play game services are available today through an SDK for Android, and a native iOS SDK
for iPhone and iPad games. Web and other platform developers will also find corresponding REST
APIs, with libraries for JavaScript, Java, Python, Go, Dart, PHP, and more.
We’re excited to see what games will do with these new services and experiences, and this is
only the beginning. Wait until you get to the boss battle... er.. Check out our developer site
to get started:
https://developers.google.com/games/.
Greg Hartrell is Lead Product Manager on Google Play game services, devoted to
helping developers make incredible games through Google Play. In his spare time, he enjoys
jumping from platform to platform, boss battles and matching objects in
threes.
Posted by Scott Knaster,
Editor
