Google are certainly busy today with their annual developer conference taking place, and more specifically the keynote itself is ongoing at this moment. They have just announced Google Play game services which will never offer complete back end support for gamers and the developers of those games. Users will now be able to cloud save all their game data, but even more important it will be active among all of your devices, meaning if you finish a few levels on your smartphone, than you can pick up from where you left off on your tablet. Users can just sign in with their Google+/gmail login details to send invites or compare scores on the leader boards with friends and the public.
All the new features will be pushed out behind the scenes for devices running Froyo and up and it works with any devices that runs Google play, a more interesting factor will also be the support for iOS devices as well for even more seemless integration and transitions.
The biggest feature set will be the extra competitive and cooperative support that will include up to four players with voice chat.
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Introducing Google Play game services (May 15th, 2013)
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 G+ 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.
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, Lead Product Manager
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