Why you should be using Google Play Games services

my name is Tobias no key I'm with Google now for six years and my focus is on working together with developers in Western Europe for one helping them to make great games for google play and to to develop our ecosystem for google play so today i would like to share with you some best practices we have for launching game successfully on google play but before doing so i will give you just the hint on how big our platform is in case you didn't know so we have more than 1 billion active devices worldwide we have partnerships with 400 OEMs and four and five hundred operators and also we are adding 1.5 million Android devices daily so this quite an extensive region might be interesting for you to develop games for also if we just look at aamir you can see that in terms of market share android is pretty strong

seventy-seven percent of all smartphones and amia are running Android and this number has increased recently also it's pretty good on a tablet side three out of five tablets enemy are on Android as well so one more slide with facts and figures and then we talk about the real thing but I think we just want to go through this as well so we also estimate a lot of growth for amia we're always talking about growth in emerging countries but Amir has emerging countries as well such as Russia such as Turkey and over the next five years we expect a number of devices to double and Android will be a very strong growth driver to do so so now we've talked about having a big big audience but what do you do what can you do to leverage this audience for making games so one part of my job and the job of our team is to develop features which are customized for game developers and this is a list of all the features we have

been developing so no worries you do not need to read through all of this this is basically to show you that we have basically doubled the number of features since 2012 so we see a 2012 2013 2014-2015 we are really trying to invest our time into listening to game developers and to give features of the ground which help you to be more successful in play so we have a lot of features here let's concentrate on the most important things we do at Google and I have a little framework for you as well so we can just go through developing a game so first you have the idea i'm sure there are many people here with great ideas in the audience that shouldn't be a problem then there is a prototyping phase you sit together have pizza beer whatever you like and you go for developing three prototypes or so next step then would be to advance to a soft launch probably then even launching one of these create projects one project

which you know didn't fail the starbucks test or which test you ever want to apply and then last but not least you want to optimize the game experience on google play or even on other platforms and for each of these steps except the ideas because you're your best guys for doing so for each of these steps we have a tool and we have a service you may want to use and in the next minutes i will just give you a glimpse of these tools and would give you some more details on how you can use them best so the first tool who in the audience has developed or is developing for android hands up please ok that's that's pretty good you're working for google but it's ok so um and who we're in the audience has used alpha or beta testing before ok cool so this is basically just a little tool we launched it a while ago but we thought it's very important to have it so i'm bringing it up here again this is a tool which helps you to launch the

game to a small audience and there are two types of doing an alpha or beta test one is to do an open test you basically have your early apk and then you have the opportunity to share this link with your community or somewhere on the web people can then download download the game and and you can see through your analytics how this is working out they cannot leave reviews in the store by the way and the other option is to have an open beta testing or open alpha testing sorry the that it was the closed beta testing right so the close testing is you are sharing and your APK with google group a google+ community in case you use that social network or just people with a google email address so we have two variants of using that alpha and beta testing and basically this should give you a good tool to get user interaction with your game to see data and to roll it out to a small number of users and

once you've done that and you've done that successfully you might have warned want to launch this in a soft launch in a certain market like Taiwan or a Canada or New Zealand or what so ever and to do this properly you do not only want to optimize your game you also want to optimize how your game is appearing in the store because that makes a big big difference if people are downloading it or not so may us again who you're in the audience has used store listing experiments before has heard of it yeah almost equally so cool so so listing experiments is basically the option to test how good your icon is how good is your header your description your key images you basically have the chance to have your control group and a test group and then you can see which I can works best and do not underestimate how good it is to have a strong icon it can really really drive downloads and I see some people nodding here which I haven't been paid before so that's good so let's do a little quiz this is an example from

congregate and congregate they had a control group that was their original icon and three other icons and they wants to test which i can is better and so we're just some some minutes before the coffee break so we can do a little bit you know of interaction before doing so who here it things that the first lady the other lady would resonate better with the audience stand the control group almost nobody have 12 who would say the guy gets more downloads than the lady with a weapon okay okay and last but Lisa goes for the hell okay so i would say that the guy what would one if we here would be the audience let's see what congregate found out by using store listing experiments well what's the helicopter right so i think this just proves like the power of those testings you can also this is not another Google invention right so you do

testings all the time if you do marketing if you do tests but nevertheless it is pretty handy to have such a tool to optimize Europeans in a play store and just some best practices and how you use throw listing experiments one conduct your testing based on the hypothesis so in this case they wanted to find out if they should go for a human character or if they should go for a weapon or a helicopter then launch and iterate test again and again maybe you do not find the perfect icon maybe you need to test again again but that's a good thing also we are showing up a banner and you develop a console once you've found the perfect icon so we help you in you know stopping a test and doing next one and last but not least be bold and just just try out things because you know it doesn't hurt so this is basically how we help you for going soft launch let's talk about launch so we have been working on a feature called pre-registration this is a very early stage right now but I have

a case study with here with me so I can tell you a bit about what glue did when launching Terminator and of lost year so this tool basically allows you to get players signed up for your game before it actually has been released so what glued it they had a big marketing campaign three weeks before releasing the game and they directed users to a landing page and that landing page basically included get it on google play now and get a free welcome pack so what happened when users clicked on that they were directed to the Play Store but of course it couldn't download it because you know it wasn't available yet but they could click on pre-register and when they clicked on pre-register you can see it on the third screenshot they could also also share that with their friends so probably they got some more people interested in that and pre-registered and then once the game was launched all the people who

pre-register for the game got a notification hey it's ready go terminating now again this is a very helpful to it's a very early stages we can talk about it afterwards if you want to but just an example what we do in trying to help you getting a lot of users when you launch your game alright let's talk about optimizing your game we've talked know about launching a game let's say you have your game launched already and you want to optimize the performance who here has heard of or has ever used Google Play game services Wow cool most hands up here that's pretty that's pretty awesome so Google Play game services then i guess i doona need to tell you too much about it but basically it's our our life service or a turnkey solution which any bits you to have achievements ready leader both ready and other cool stuff ready as an example you can edit quests without touching the apk and there's one very

important thing as well next to having cool features for your gamers if you integrate Google Play game services you have access to a player analytics and player analytics is basically our tool for measuring all users perform in the game to see what about the revenue what about different cohorts how do they behave I'll do their work and we really continue to invest in that solution because we believe that working with data can really help to enhance the game performance over time let me give you two examples how you can use player analytics to boost your game and I give you the example of Eric framling eric is basically one man army who developed the game called bomb squad quite cool game three million downloads very compelling ratings even a little community but he was on his own so he couldn't could not do everything by himself and we work together with him to see if player analytics can help and what our product manager did he was developing the

sources and sync report with the sources and sync report Eric was able dramatically increases average revenue per daily active user and I will tell you why so here on this screen shot you can see the sources and sync report and the orange line is basically how many and how many tickets were earned by players and the blue line says how many tickets were spent by players and at the very beginning the people had basically more money than they wanted to wanted to give away which is not very good I mean it's great from the players point of view but from developers one of you people are not spending enough so what Eric did then he was basically optimizing the in-game performance he didn't make it unfair or so because you know if you screw up your in-game balancing then basically people will leave and it's not a good game anymore but what he did is he optimized the game a bit and afterwards basically people

were spending more than they were earning and thus Eric was getting some more in-game currency buys and better IEP performance so this is basically how you can analyze if your in-game economy is healthy or not and if you have something like Eric you can make some changes to earn more revenue last but at least one thing we are rolling out this week and we are sharing this with a blog post later this week as well is a tool called predictive analysis predictive analysis is basically using the player stats API and it enables you to find out if there's a probability of your users getting churned or spent so if you use this API Google can tell you how big the probability is of your users if they get churned or if they spend and if they are just about to churn you might want to show them some very compelling content or a very customized event or if they

about to spend and you know there's a high indication then you might want to show them some discounted ads or offers and we basically use signals from google and play to help you determine this probability so something to watch out for as well so this was basically google play in a nutshell some selection of our key features we have or we can help you to go from an idea to prototyping to soft launch launching your game and an optimizing your game with Google Play game services and player analytics there's of course more stuff we're working on one example I guess you've seen it already it's a great thing called video recording where your players are recording themselves and then uploading that to youtube but for now just thank you for your time and if you have questions please let me ax