Google Play Games getting online events and new profiles

By Richard Devine
published

Google Play Games got its moment in the spotlight in the Google I/O keynote today, where Google's Ellie Powers rolled through some new features for the gamers among us that should add a nice little boost to the experience.

The new Games Profile will change automatically based upon in-game achievements and will give gamers a unique identity. Also new is Quests, a new set of APIs for game developers to run online time-based events inside the games without requiring an update to be pushed out. This will be available to developers and gamers in the next update to Google Play Services and Google Play Games.

Additionally, Powers filled us in that $5 billion has been paid out on top of Google Play to game developers, an increase of 2.5x on before last years Google I/O. And that's pretty good news for those folks.

Richard Devine
Richard Devine
6 Comments
  • I tried signing up for Google Play Games once. It required Google+ so I promptly disabled it from my app drawer. If I they remove that requirement I may check it out.
  • So you wanted to use Google Play Games social platform but you didn't want to use Google's social platform? Google+ is Google's profile, it's the profile for all of their services. You don't actually have to use Google+ but you do have to have a Google+ profile to use any of Google's services at this point. Get over it already.
  • Don't know why everyone's so against having a G+ account. I mean it's about as useful as a Facebook account. You just use it to log into stuff. Sent from Rooted Galaxy S4
  • This kind of amusing. I forgot about Google Play Games a few months after it came out. It's really only handy for developers right?
  • There are games that already use these features. Glu's new Frontline game has the timed online gaming feature active for the past month. Posted from my "KNOX-FREE" 4.3 Sprint GS3 Maxx...!!!
  • Nice set of features! Really keen to start playing around with Achievements and Quests.