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What Was Announced at the Google for Games Developer Summit
Google is holding the Google for Games Developer Summit, where developers can watch the announcements and virtually attend sessions for free at g.co/gamedevsummit.
Google's teams have been building solutions to help game developers tackle their challenges. You can check out the highlights below:
Build games and reach a wider audience with Android and Google Play
New Android tools for mobile game development:
- Android Studio Profilers: Google has overhauled the Android Studio System Trace profiler to allow developers to inspect and visualize in fine detail how their code is being executed. Google also added native memory profiling capabilities so developers can see how their game is allocating memory and find memory leaks.
- Android Game Development Extension for Visual Studio: Google is introducing a new tool to make it easy to add Android support for cross-platform games. This integrates easily with existing Visual Studio-based workflows so now developers can conveniently generate APKs, deploy to Android devices or an emulator, and debug their Android game from within Visual Studio.
- Android GPU Inspector: Google's new Android GPU Inspector enables developers to look deeply into an Android GPU and see detailed information about their game’s render stages and GPU counters. Now graphics engineers are empowered with information and insights to optimize their game for better frame rates and more battery life.
- Game Package Registry for Unity by Google: Google's new package registry consolidates various Google APIs, starting with Google Play Billing, Android App Bundles, Play Asset Delivery, Play Instant, and Firebase for Games, all in one place.
Crytek announced Android support: CRYENGINE is known as a high performance game engine for PCs and game consoles and will be adding a full Android pipeline to their engine this summer.
New ways to reach more devices & users
Google is introducing a few new tools to help the development process and provide greater insights into the game’s performance:
- Google Play Asset Delivery: Introducing a new set of delivery features for games services, building on the App Bundle infrastructure to give developers free, dynamic delivery of the right game assets to the right devices at the right time. All of this allows players to get into a game faster while assets are being downloaded, while developers cut the costs of hosting and delivering d game resources.
- Android vitals native crash symbolication: Now developers can debug their native crashes more easily with support for native symbols in Play Console. Simply upload your native debug symbols to get the benefits in Android Vitals.
- Android vitals performance insights with Android Performance Tuner: Google is making it possible to optimize frame rate and fidelity across many devices at scale with new performance insights in Android vitals. For those in Google's developer preview, you can unlock this by integrating the new Android Performance Tuner into your game: a new library in the Android Game SDK.
- Play Billing Library 2 for Unity developers: Game developers using Unity can now access all of Play Billing Library 2's features, such as allowing users to pay with cash and surfacing IAPs outside of the game.
The Google Play store is shifting to be more gameplay centric by showing more visuals that demonstrate gameplay and a new system of tags to help users learn more about specific game traits and aid in exploration:
- Emphasis on quality: Google continue to emphasize high quality gaming experiences across Google Play, to encourage immersive gameplay with strong technical performance and being free of crashes.
- Pre-registration: Hundreds-of-millions of players use pre-registration campaigns on Google Play each year, making it an effective way to expand the reach on launch. Google will soon be rolling out day 1 auto-installation for all pre-registration games, to help developers build early consumer awareness and capture pre-launch demand.
- Play Pass: Late last year Google launched Play Pass in the US market as a subscription service providing users with access to hundreds of great apps and games on Google
- Play, completely free of ads and in-app purchases.
Grow your business with Google Ads and AdMob
Google Ads and AdMob are introducing new ways to analyze and utilize player insights to help developers grow their games and earn revenue.
Scale your global game with Google Cloud Game Servers
Hosting and scaling a global game can be challenging and requires that developers either build costly solutions, or turn to pre-packaged ones that limit choice and control. To offer developers more choices and time to dedicate to core elements of producing games, the Google Cloud team is introducing a simplified, convenient way for managing game server clusters.
Build and publish the games with Stadia
For developers of all sizes looking to bring their games to Stadia, Google's team is unveiling Stadia Makers, a new program to support the independent development community.