Today, Google announced a few new features for the Google Play Games service that developers can take advantage of. Those features include Key Player stats, alerts, and double the Cloud Save storage. Basically, Google is making it even easier for developers to understand what players are doing in their game, manage their game features and store more data in the Google cloud.
If you’re one of the many Android game developers out there, you can actually now see key player stats directly in your Developer Console. This information includes the number of players signed into your game through Google, the percentage of players who have unlocked an achievement, and how many scores are posted to your leaderboards. There’s also the Game Services alerts in the Developer Console, which should help you identify issues and optimizations in your app. These include anything from incorrect IDs for achievements to leaderboards, forgetting to hit the publish button of having your throttled because you accidentally called a method in a tight loop. Of course the third feature is pretty self explanatory. Developers now get even more storage for cloud saving games. Which is great to see, but I thought it was already unlimited, guess I thought wrong. Google is saying, beginning October 14th, you’ll be able to store twice the amount of data through Cloud save. So instead of getting 256kb per slot, you get a full megabyte for each user.
You can read the full announcement on the Android Developers blog, as well as view the Google+ post down below. This sounds like great news for Android developers, but unfortunately, users may not see much of a difference.
How many of our Android developers out there have a game with Google Play Games enabled? Give it a shoutout in the comments below, we love Google Play Games, games.