Google Mobile Developer Day at Game Developers Conference 2019

Posted by Kacey Fahey, Developer Marketing, Google Play & Android

We're excited to host the Google Mobile Developer Day at Game Developers Conference 2019. We are taking this opportunity to share best practices and our plans to help your games businesses, which are fuelling incredible growth in the global mobile games market. According to Newzoo, mobile games revenue is projected to account for nearly 60% of global games revenue by 2021. The drivers of this growth come in many forms, including more developers building great games, new game styles blurring the lines of traditional genres, and the explosion of gaming in emerging markets - most notably in India.

Image Source: GamesIndustry.biz

To support your growth, Google is focused on improving the game development experience on Android. We are investing in tools to give you better insights into what is happening on devices, as well as in people and teams to address your feedback about the development process, graphics, multiplayer experiences, and more.

We have some great updates and new tools to improve game discovery and monetization on Google Play, which we also shared today during our Mobile Developer Day:

Pre-registration now in general availability

Starting today, we are launching pre-registration for general availability. Set up a pre-registration campaign in the Google Play Console and start marketing your games to build awareness before launch. Users who pre-register receive a notification at launch, which helps increase day one installs.

Google Play Instant gaining adoption

We have seen strong adoption of Google Play Instant with 3x growth in the number of instant games and 5x growth in the number of instant sessions over the last six months. Instant experiences allow players to tap the 'Try Now' button on your store listing page and go straight to a demo experience in a matter of seconds, without installing. Now, they're even easier to build with Cocos and Unity plug-ins and an expanded implementation partner program. Discover the latest updates on Google Play Instant.

Android App Bundles momentum and new large download size threshold

Over 60K apps and games on Google Play are now using the Android App Bundle publishing format, which is supported in Android Studio, Unity, and Cocos Creator. The app bundle uses Google Play's Dynamic Delivery to deliver a smaller, optimized APK containing only the resources needed for a specific device.

To better support high quality game experiences and reflect improved devices, we've also increased the size limit for APKs generated from app bundles to 150MB and raised the threshold for large download user warnings on the Google Play Store to 150MB, from 100MB.

Improved tools in the Google Play Console

Store listing experiments let you A/B test changes to your store listing on actual Play Store visitors. We recently rolled out improvements, introducing two new metrics - first time installers and D1 retained users - to more accurately reflect the performance of your store listings. These two new metrics are now reported with hourly intervals and are available via email notifications, letting you see results faster and track performance better.

Country targeted store listings allow you to tailor your app's store listing to appeal to users in different countries. You can customize the app title, icon, descriptions and graphic assets, allowing you to better appeal to users in specific target markets. For example, you can now tailor your store listing with different versions of the English language for users in India versus the United States.

Rewarded ads give players the choice to watch an advertisement in exchange for in-app items. With rewarded ads in Google Play, you can now create and manage rewarded ads through the Google Play Console. No additional SDK integrations are required.

We hope you try some of these new tools and keep sharing ideas so we can make Android and Google Play a better place to grow your business. We are committed to continue improving the platform and building tools that better serve the gaming community.

Get started today by visiting two new resources, a hub for developers interested in creating games on Android and games.withgoogle.com, for developers looking to connect and scale their business across Google. Many of these updates and resources come from community suggestions, so sign up for our monthly newsletter to stay informed.

Watch the session recordings and product updates shared during Google Mobile Developer Day.

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