Hutch is a London based mobile studio focusing entirely on racing games, with more than 10 million players on Google Play. For their latest game, MMX Hill Climb, they used A/B testing and game analytics to improve the game design and experience resulting in more than 48 mins daily active usage per user.
Watch Shaun Rutland, CEO, and Robin Scannell, Games Analyst, explain how they were able to deliver a more engaging user experience in this video.
Learn more about A/B testing and get the Playbook for Developers app to stay up-to-date on new features and learn best practices that will help you grow a successful business on Google Play.
Posted by Jamil Moledina, Google Play, Games Strategic Lead
To celebrate the art of the latest innovative indie games, we’re hosting the first Google Play Indie Games Festival in North America on September 24th in San Francisco. At the festival, Android fans and gamers will have a unique opportunity to play new and unreleased indie games from some of the most innovative developers in the US and Canada, as well as vote for their favorite ones.
Registration is now open and the event is free for everyone to enjoy.
We’re also excited to announce the games selected to exhibit and compete at the event. From over 200 submissions, we carefully picked 30 games that promise the most fun and engaging experiences to attendees. Fans will have a chance to play a variety of indie games not yet available publicly.
Check out the full list of games selected here and below.
Fans will also have the opportunity to vote for their favorite games at the festival, along with an authoritative panel of judges from Google Play and the game industry. They include:
We are also thrilled to announce that veteran game designer and professor Richard Lemarchand will be the emcee for the event. He was lead designer at Crystal Dynamics and Naughty Dog, and is now Associate Chair and Associate Professor at the University of Southern California, School of Cinematic Arts, Interactive Media and Games Division.
The winning developers will receive prizes, such Google Cloud credits, NVIDIA SHIELD Android TVs and K1 tablets, Razer Forge TV bundles, and more, to recognize their efforts.
Join us for an exciting opportunity to connect with fellow game fans, get inspired, and celebrate the art of indie games. Learn more about the event on the event website.
Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering
Android 7.0 Nougat
Today, Android 7.0 Nougat will begin rolling out to users, starting with Nexus devices. At the same time, we’re pushing the Android 7.0 source code to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), extending public availability of this new version of Android to the broader ecosystem.
We’ve been working together with you over the past several months to get your feedback on this release, and also to make sure your apps are ready for the users who will run them on Nougat devices.
Android Nougat reflects input from thousands of fans and developers like you, all around the world. There are over 250 major features in Android Nougat, including VR Mode in Android. We’ve worked at all levels of the Android stack in Nougat — from how the operating system reads sensor data to how it sends pixels to the display — to make it especially built to provide high quality mobile VR experiences.
Plus, Nougat brings a number of new features to help make Android more powerful, more productive and more secure. It introduces a brand new JIT/AOT compiler to improve software performance, make app installs faster, and take up less storage. It also adds platform support for Vulkan, a low-overhead, cross-platform API for high-performance, 3D graphics. Multi-Window support lets users run two apps at the same time, and Direct Reply so users can reply directly to notifications without having to open the app. As always, Android is built with powerful layers of security and encryption to keep your private data private, so Nougat brings new features like File-based encryption, seamless updates, and Direct Boot.
You can find all of the Nougat developer resources here, including details on behavior changes and new features you can use in your apps. An overview of what's new for developers is available here, and you can explore all of the new user features in Nougat here.
Multi-window mode in Android Nougat
Starting today and rolling out over the next several weeks, the Nexus 6, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Nexus 9, Nexus Player, Pixel C, and General Mobile 4G (Android One) will get an over-the-air software update to Android 7.0 Nougat. Devices enrolled in the Android Beta Program will also receive this final version.
And there are many tasty devices coming from our partners running Android Nougat, including the upcoming LG V20, which will be the first new smartphone that ships with Android Nougat, right out of the box.
With all of these new devices beginning to run Nougat, now is the time to publish your app updates to Google Play. We recommend compiling against, and ideally targeting, API 24. If you’re still testing some last minute changes, a great strategy to do this is using Google Play’s beta testing feature to get early feedback from a small group of users — including those using Android 7.0 Nougat — and then doing a staged rollout as you release the updated app to all users.
We’re moving Nougat into a new regular maintenance schedule over the coming quarters. In fact, we’ve already started work on the first Nougat maintenance release, that will bring continued refinements and polish, and we’re planning to bring that to you this fall as a developer preview. Stay tuned!
We’ll be closing open bugs logged against Developer Preview builds soon, but please keep the feedback coming! If you still see an issue that you filed in the preview tracker, just file a new issue against Android 7.0 in the AOSP issue tracker.
Thanks for being part of the preview, which we shared earlier this year with an eye towards giving everyone the opportunity to make the next release of Android stronger. Your continued feedback has been extremely beneficial in shaping this final release, not just for users, but for the entire Android ecosystem.
Posted by Kobi Glick, Google Play team
With over one million apps published through the Google Play Developer Console, we know how important it is to publish with confidence, acquire users, learn about them, and manage your business. Whether reacting to a critical performance issue or responding to a negative review, checking on your apps when and where you need to is invaluable.
The Google Play Developer Console app, launched in May, has already helped thousands of developers stay informed of crucial business updates on the go.
We’re excited to tell you about new features, available today:
Receive notifications about new reviews
Use filters to find the reviews you want
Review and apply store listing experiment results
Increase the percent of a staged rollout or halt a bad staged rollout
Download the Developer Console app on Google Play and stay on top of your apps and games, wherever you are! Also, get the Playbook for Developers app to stay up-to-date with more features and best practices that will help you grow a successful business on Google Play.
Posted by Lily Sheringham, Google Play team
Based in Lisbon, Portugal, Hole19 is a golfing app which assists golfers before, during, and after their golfing journey with GPS and a digital scorecard. The app connects the golfing community with shared statistics for performance and golf courses, and now has close to 1 million users across all platforms.
Watch Anthony Douglas, Founder & CEO, and Fábio Carballo, Head Android Developer, explain how Hole19 doubled its number of Android Wear users in 6 months, and improved user engagement and retention on the platform. Also, hear how they are using APIs and the latest Wear 2.0 features to connect users to their golfing data and improve the user experience.
Learn more how to get started with Android Wear and get the Playbook for Developers app to stay up-to-date with more features and best practices that will help you grow a successful business on Google Play.
Posted by Rahim Nathwani Product Manager, App Translation Service
With users in 190 countries around the world, Google Play offers you a truly global audience for your apps and games. Localization is one of the most powerful ways to connect with people in different places, which is why we launched translation support for in-app purchase and Universal App Campaigns earlier this year. With over 30 language translation options available via the Developer Console, we updated our app translation service to help you select the most relevant languages, making it quick and easy to get started.
With the launch of new language and country analytics, you gain access to app install analysis on Google Play, including:
To make ordering translations easier, we show language bundles that you can add to your order in a single click.
To get started, select Manage translations -> Purchase translations from the Store Listing page in the Google Play Developer Console.
Posted by Moonlit Wang, Partner Development Manager at Google Play Games, & Tammy Levy, Director of Product for Mobile at Kongregate
In today’s world of game-as-a-service on mobile, the lifetime value of a player is a lot more complex, where revenue is now the sum of many micro transactions instead of a single purchase with traditional console games.
Of course you don’t need a sophisticated statistical model to understand that the more time a player invests in your game, and the more money they spend, the greater their LTV. But how can you design and improve monetization as a mobile game developer? Here are 5 tips to help you improve game-as-a-service monetization, with best practice examples from mobile games publisher, Kongregate:
1. Track player behavior metrics that have a strong and positive correlation with LTV
2. Optimize for long-term engagement and delight your best players
Retention is the first metric that can distinguish great games from mediocre ones. Games with higher retention rates throughout the user’ lifecycle, monetize better consistently. Retention is king, and more importantly, long-term retention should be prioritized. Therefore, when designing your game, aim to create a sophisticated and engaging experience to delight your most committed fans.
Kongregate decided to keep the higher priced Super Shard Bot in the store, although both packs resulted in very similar retention rates:
4. As well as what monetization features to implement, take into consideration why, when and how to do so
5. Take into account local prices and pricing models
Get the Playbook for Developers app and stay up-to-date with more features and best practices that will help you grow a successful business on Google Play.
