Back in March, google announced some new game stats in the Google Play Developer Console. These stats were designed to provide more information for Google Play game devs and make it easier for them to see what was going on with their apps. Today, Google announced that they are adding new features to the Game Developer Console. They are adding stats for a user’s country of origin, gender dimensions, and age to the existing reporting tools that devs can access.
The new demographics will be in the Dev Console Overview stats, and the stats will be in the Players reports for both New and Active users. Google’s goal is to provide devs with more information so they can make better decisions about their apps. Player retention and helping devs make more money are key areas of focus with this additional info. Google even presented some use cases. From the Android Developers Blog: “You just launched your new game globally, and expected it do particularly well in Germany. Using country demographic data, you see that Germany is much less active than expected. After some digging, you realize that your tutorial was not properly translated to German. Based on this insight, you immediately roll out a fix to see if you can improve active users in Germany.”
Google Play Games is the cross-platform game service that was announced at Google I/O 2013. Since its announcement, Google has built new services into it and made it better for devs. The Google Play Games platform lets devs build new features into their games without having to develop the features themselves. Things like multiplayer, achievements, and leaderboards that Google has built into the service can be used by developers. Services like online game backup are a headache for a developer to implement on a large scale. Play Games lets devs use Google’s back end power. The developers make more money and can create better games, and Google gets all of those users and their data. It’s a win-win situation. Google is making the Play Developer Console even better with the addition of these new demographics tools.