What Google Play Services 4.1 means for Android games: an interview with Pocket Gems Android Product Lead, Arjun Dayal
Many of you will have heard that Google recently updated its Google Play Services to 4.1, bringing in a whole slew of updates that improves the back-end of quite a few of Google’s services, but most notably for Android gamers, it added a few improvements related to games.
The 4.1 update introduces brand new framework that allows Google Play Games to manage matchmaking as well as handle turn-based games for 2-8 players. While any improvement to the games ecosystem is good, it’s not always immediately obvious how this is. To help elucidate what these changes mean for Android games, we were fortunate enough to interview Arjun Dayal, Android Product Lead at Pocket Gems, the publisher behind such popular games as Animal Voyage and Tap Paradise Cove, and find out their perspective of the changes.
SY: Thanks for joining us today, Arjun. First off, with the changes to Google Play Services 4.1 coming in, what does this mean for both Pocket Gems, and more broadly, for Android games in general?
AD: Much of mobile game development is moving away from being a primarily single player experience to an immersive social one. This Google Play Services update, with its new features such as matchmaking, will reduce the barrier for all developers to create multiplayer experiences that push the boundaries of what’s possible in game design. We’re excited to see more market innovations in social that better connect players with their peers as a way of improving engagement across mobile.
For Pocket Gems, we’ve been excited for years about innovations that help connect players to their peers, and have built tech to support that multiplayer vision. Now, we’re focused on making those multiplayer experiences real-time with the goal of taking mobile player engagement to the next level.
SY: Do you think with these changes and the onus of matchmaking and turn-based game saving now on Google that we’ll be seeing more competition in the genre of turn-based and multiplayer games? And for those already in the space, is it frustrating to see such a fundamental framework change come in when some developers have already come up with ways to circumvent the previous deficiency?
AD: We’re definitely going to see more competition in the multiplayer space, and that’s great for players across mobile. It’s a positive for the industry when complex systems like turn-based matchmaking are solved at a platform level. This update enables game developers to focus core resources back on player experience and improving product quality with the additional cycles saved. It’s not frustrating for us to see framework changes for tech we’ve already built. In many ways it’s a positive validation that the concepts we’ve been building internally are the future of the market.
SY: Seeing as this change brings Google Play Services more in line with Game Center on iOS, will we be seeing more games be simultaneously developed on iOS and Android instead of the standard iOS release followed by an Android release several weeks/months later?
AD: Players want great games on their favorite devices regardless of if they use an Android phone, iPad, or Kindle. Platform SDK updates and cross-platform tech have made the challenge of simultaneous release more achievable and we’re excited to be innovating on that front.
We’ve invested in systems and cross-platform tech that allow us to launch our titles simultaneously. For example, we launched our game, Animal Voyage, simultaneously across multiple platforms and have seen very positive responses from our players who appreciate the wider support. We hope that as time goes on the best experiences continue to win out and players are able to enjoy our products on any device anywhere around the world.
SY: What other differences still exist between iOS and Android that you as a developer would want to be implemented
AD: Both Android and iOS continue to evolve rapidly and we think that’s great for the industry. We’re not concerned with the feature differences at this point, but are more focused on ensuring we can utilize the tools on both platforms to create the best experiences for our players.
SY: Fragmentation is obviously a very common and overarching theme for Android that will probably haunt it forever, lest it become iOS. From a developer’s perspective, what does fragmentation mean for you and the games you develop?
AD: Our primary goal is to develop the best experience for as many players as possible. While being a difficult challenge, device fragmentation has actually allowed us to expand our reach around the world by making devices more accessible to all types of players.
That said, it is a challenge to develop games for the 3500+ existing Android devices, not including OS considerations, that have a wide variety of specs.
At Pocket Gems, we’ve solved this challenge by having a very rigorous QA process for our games across a matrix of device types and operating systems. This process ensures we catch potential issues early in the build cycle when they’re more easily fixed. That said, we still do make decisions to not support specific devices when their performance specs are not capable of supporting the new game play experiences we’re developing.
Google Play’s newer build rollout feature has also been a helpful way for us to monitor product quality of releases and ensure our updates are the highest quality possible.
SY: Finally, what can we expect from Pocket Gems in the near future? Any games on the horizon?
AD: We’ve got some awesome games from different categories and genres set to roll out in the next year. Nothing official to announce just yet, but you can expect us to be pushing the boundaries of real-time multiplayer and 3D. Stay tuned!
SY: Thanks for your time, Arjun
Hopefully those answers will give you a better idea of what’s going on in the Android gaming world at the moment. It’s always good to know that Google is on the ball and making changes that make game developers, and in turn, gamers, happy.
Arjun is the Android Product Lead at Pocket Gems focused on creating original Android games and bringing new cross-platform products to market. Previous to Pocket Gems, he worked at Microsoft where he helped create the first release version of the Xbox Kinect.
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