Google Play unveils ‘play as you download’ for Android games
Google announced “play as you download” on Android 12 devices so players can hop into mobile games and begin playing during a download. And it also said Google Play now reaches more than 2.5 billion gamers.
It’s all about reducing the friction for players when it comes to playing mobile games — a topic that I recently wrote about in a DeanBeat column.
Google’s Google Play division made the announcement during the Google for Games Summit keynote today, which would have normally taken place during the Game Developers Conference in March. But the pandemic changed the plans, and Google broke it off from the online-only GDC that takes place next week.
Game companies such as Utomik have done progressive downloads for the PC for a while, but Google’s move will enable the capability for many more mobile game players.
Greg Hartrell, the product management director for Google Play and Android, said in an interview with GamesBeat that the new download feature greatly speeds up the download and play process.
“It enables you to get into gameplay in seconds from the store listing while the game continues to download in the background,” Hartrell said. “This is a vastly improved user experience in Android 12. We saw 400MB games becoming available in the last 10 seconds instead of many minutes. And that’s because we’re streaming assets intelligently in the background.”
On the download feature, Google also created Play Asset Delivery to ensure players spend less time waiting for downloads without sacrificing the quality of a game. Now, Texture Compression Format Targeting automatically figures out what modern compression formats to use to further reduce a game’s size.
Google Play also revealed other new features for Android gamers. They include a new game dashboard for players to quickly access important settings while playing games (i.e., being able to quickly screen record or adjust brightness, etc.).
For developers, new Game Mode application programming interfaces (APIs) will enable them to adapt their games more quickly to the preferences of their players (i.e., optimizing performance when they are in a battery saving mode).
