Our big bet on mobile games at Game Developers Conference 2018

Posted by Benjamin Frenkel, Product Manager, Google Play Instant

We've been working hard to make Google Play the premier platform for game discovery and a place for you to grow your business. In the last year, the number of Android users who installed a game has more than doubled. Nearly 40% of that growth came from emerging markets, including Brazil, India, Indonesia and Mexico. Our investments extend beyond the Play Store and include many key Google products:

• Last week, we introduced a gaming solution from Google Maps APIs that enables you to build game worlds based on real world data to find the best places for gameplay.
  
• We also launched Agones, an open source, dedicated game server hosting product built on Google Cloud Platform, in collaboration with Ubisoft, to support multiplayer games.
  
• At last month's Mobile World Congress, we released version 1.0 of ARCore, our augmented reality SDK for Android, enabling you to publish AR apps and games to Google Play for the first time and reach 100M devices across the Android ecosystem.
  
• Over the next few months, we'll roll out a beta for click-to-play video ads on Google Play—a new way to reach players with sight, sound and motion. These placements will help you showcase your games.

Today, during our annual Google Developer Day at the Game Developers Conference, we introduced new tools and platforms to improve the overall game discovery on Google Play and give you more ways to deliver engaging player experiences.

Introducing Google Play Instant

With all the great games available on Google Play, we want to make discovery easier and remove friction during the install process. Installing and opening a game takes time and results in many players never getting to experience your game. We're thrilled to announce that instant apps is now available for games.

This means that with a tap, players can try a game without having to download it first. Games available instantly today include: Clash Royale, Words with Friends 2, and Bubble Witch 3 Saga, and other titles from Playtika, MZ, Jam City, and Hothead Games.

We're calling this new experience Google Play Instant. To try it out, simply launch the Google Play Store on your Android device and visit the Instant Gameplay collection. Or, you can visit the "Arcade" in our redesigned Google Play Games app and launch any of the "Instant Gameplay" collection games. Google Play Instant makes it easier to have your players invite their friends to try out games right away through social invites and lets you share games through marketing campaigns.

Google Play Instant is still in closed beta and we look forward to opening it more broadly later this year. It provides a collection of extensions to the instant apps framework that better support the needs of game developers; including a higher APK size limit to 10MB, progressive download support for executable code and game assets, and support for NDK and game engines using existing tool chains. We're also working with popular game development platform Unity, and others including Cocos, to add IDE support making it easy for developers to build instant apps. Developers can sign up for more information about Google Play Instant as it becomes available.

Discover insights from game developers who have successfully benefited from Google Play Instant. Read how Zynga, King, Hothead Games, Jam City, Playtika, MZ and Magma Mobile successfully used instant apps to acquire new users, improve retention, and effectively cross-promote their games.

Google Play Console tools to build high quality games

We also added some useful tools to the Play Console to help you build great games, including:

• A new internal testing track that will allow you to quickly test and iterate on new games and features. The track is additional to the alpha and beta testing tracks, and makes your game available for up to 100 testers within seconds.
  
• Demo loops for the pre-launch report, a new feature that lets you predefine a likely series of actions in a game and have this "loop" run on on live devices in the Test Lab (bypassing the robo crawler).

This is just the start of what we have planned for 2018. We can't wait to see Google Play Instant bring new audiences to your games.