برچسب: grow

Making Google Play the best place to grow PC games
Posted by Aurash Mahbod – VP and GM of Games on Google Play

We’re stepping up our multiplatform gaming offering with exciting news dropping at this year’s Game Developers Conference (GDC). We’re bringing users more games, more ways to play your games across devices, and improved gameplay. You can read all about the updates for users from The Keyword. At GDC, we’ll be diving into all of the latest games coming to Play, plus new developer tools that’ll help improve gameplay across the Android ecosystem.

Today, we’re sharing a closer look at what’s new from Play. We’re expanding our support for native PC games with a new earnback program and making Google Play Games on PC generally available this year with major upgrades. Check out the video or keep reading below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iP-Bzzn8q4s

Google Play connects developers with over 2 billion monthly active players¹ worldwide. Our tools and features help you engage these players across a wide range of devices to drive engagement and revenue. But we know the gaming landscape is constantly evolving. More and more players enjoy the immersive experiences on PC and want the flexibility to play their favorite games on any screen.

That’s why we’re making even bigger investments in our PC gaming platform. Google Play Games on PC was launched to help mobile games reach more players on PC. Today, we’re expanding this support to native PC games, enabling more developers to connect with our massive player base on mobile.

Expanding support for native PC games

For games that are designed with a PC-first audience in mind, we’ve added even more helpful tools to our native PC program. Games like Wuthering Waves, Remember of Majesty, Genshin Impact, and Journey of Monarch have seen great success on the platform. Based on feedback from early access partners, we’re taking the program even further, with comprehensive support across game development, distribution, and growth on the platform.
We’re opening up the program for all native PC games – including PC-only games – this year. Learn more about the eligibility requirements and how to join the program.

Native PC games on Google Play Games

Making PC an easy choice for mobile developers

Bringing your game to PC unlocks a whole new audience of engaged players. To help maximize your discoverability, we’re making all mobile games available³ on PC by default with the option to opt out anytime.

Games will display a playability badge indicating their compatibility with PC. “Optimized” means that a game meets all of our quality standards for a great gaming experience while “playable” means that the game meets the minimum requirements to play well on a PC. With the support of our new custom control mappings, many games can be playable right out of the box. Learn more about the playability criteria and how to optimize your games for PC today.

Thousands of new games are added to Google Play Games

To enhance our PC experience, we’ve made major upgrades to the platform. Now, gamers can enjoy the full Google Play Games on PC catalog on even more devices, including AMD laptops and desktops. We’re partnering with PC OEMs to make Google Play Games accessible right from the start menu on new devices starting this year.

We’re also bringing new features for players to customize their gaming experiences. Custom controls is now available to help tailor their setup for optimal comfort and performance. Rolling out this month, we’re adding a handy game sidebar for quick adjustments and enabling multi-account and multi-instance support by popular demand.

You can customize controls while playing Dye Hard – Color War

Unlocking exclusive rewards on PC with Play Points

To help you boost engagement, we’re also rolling out a more seamless Play Points⁴ experience on PC. Play Points balance is now easier to track and more rewarding, with up to 10x points boosters⁵ on Google Play Games. This means more opportunities for players to earn and redeem points for in-game items and discounts, enhancing the overall PC experience.

Google Play Points is integrated seamlessly with Google Play Games

Bringing new PC UA tools powered by Google Ads

More developers are launching games on PC than ever, presenting an opportunity to reach a rapidly growing audience on PC. We want to make it easier for developers to reach great players with Google Ads. We’re working on a solution to help developers run user acquisition campaigns for both mobile emulated and native PC titles within Google Play Games on PC. We’re still in the early stages of partner testing, but we look forward to sharing more details later this year.

Join the celebration!

We’re celebrating all that’s to come to Google Play Games on PC with players and developers. Take a look at the behind-the-scenes from our social channels and editorial features on Google Play. At GDC, you can dive into the complete gaming experience that is available on the best Android gaming devices. If you’ll be there, please stop by and say hello – we’re at the Moscone Center West Hall!

¹ Source: Google internal data measuring monthly users who opened a game downloaded from the Play store.

² Additional terms apply for the earnback program.

³ Your game’s visibility on Google Play Games on PC is determined by its playability badge. If your game is labeled as “Untested”, this means it will only appear if a user specifically searches for it in the Google Play Games on PC search menu. The playability badge may change once testing is complete. You can express interest in having Play evaluate your game for playability using this form.

⁵ Offered for a limited time period. Additional terms apply.
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29/04/2025
Grow your games business with a player-first approach

As an avid gamer, every year I look forward to spending time with developers at GDC to celebrate together and learn from their successes. We are all disappointed that this year’s conference was postponed, but we applaud the organizers for taking steps to protect our global community.

Although we won’t be gathering in person this year, the Google team is hosting the Google for Games Developer Summit, a free, digital-only experience where developers can watch the announcements and session content that was planned for GDC. We still wanted to share these updates with you because we think these new products will help developers succeed and are a direct response to feedback from our developer community.

As we study emerging gaming trends one of the most consistent things we’ve noticed over the years is that those who build a strong games business always put players first. That means deeply understanding players at every stage of their app journey. Today, we’re announcing new solutions that help you launch a game people love, improve it based on player insights, and earn more during the time that someone is engaged with your game.

Launch a game players love with scaled user testing

Appealing to players at launch is essential to the success of your game. Based on recent Google internal data, more than half of installs come within the first 8 weeks of an app’s release. To make the most of this influx of users, leading developers like Big Fish Games test their apps in beta before releasing them publicly. That’s why last year we introduced open testing in the Google Play Console to help you get early feedback from real users before your full release.

To get even more testers into your app, you’ll soon be able to promote Android games with open testing in Google Ads as well. By running open testing ads in App campaigns, you can drive early users to your app to test things like app stability, user retention, monetization, and effectiveness of ad creatives—then use the learning to improve your results when you launch.

In one example, Chinese developer NetEase used open testing ads to reach more beta users that helped them optimize in-app purchase behavior based on open testing data. For their new game, Dawn of Isles, Netease was able to double in-app purchases which ultimately led to higher lifetime value (LTV) at launch.

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16/04/2025
Grow your games business with new ads solutions

Maximize your ad revenue

To help you get the most value from your ads, Open Bidding will be available as a beta to all AdMob developers this fall. Today, many developers rely solely on waterfall mediation, a tried-and-true way to monetize with multiple advertising sources that can be hard to set up and manage at scale. Waterfall mediation calls ad networks one at a time until one of them returns an ad. Though effective, you could be losing out on additional revenue since networks are prioritized based on historical CPMs, rather than real-time pricing.

As Google’s in-app bidding solution, Open Bidding puts participating networks in a fair real-time auction to compete for your impressions, so the winner is always the highest paying network. This means you’ll get the highest revenue available for every impression. With Open Bidding, you can find the most popular demand sources to compete for your impressions in real time. Open Bidding makes earning more even easier by eliminating the need to manually set CPMs and reducing the number of SDKs your teams need to integrate and manage.

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15/04/2025
New ways to grow your games business sustainably

We’re introducing new changes to Open Bidding that will give you more control and transparency on how you want to work with access to 200+ real-time bidders. Soon, you’ll be able to customize the policy setup for each bidder to adjust how they spend on your inventory. And we’re continuing to add more buyers such as Snap and InMobi to increase competition and help you earn even more. With this expansion, we are announcing that Open Bidding is now generally available to all app developers. This technology represents such a fundamental improvement to how developers monetize that we are updating the product name to simply be AdMob bidding.

IGG, the creator behind popular strategy games like Lords Mobile, was looking for a monetization platform to help diversify revenue streams beyond in-app purchases. After moving to the AdMob platform and implementing bidding across all of their new casual games, the team saw their ads ARPDAU double.

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14/04/2025