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GREG HARTRELL: Thanks to everybody for attending.
Today I want to spend some time reflecting
on what we're seeing in the games ecosystem in general
and observations around what players are actually doing,
talk about the archetypes that we see
and how your game design can cater
to those archetypes and a lot of the tools
that we have that allow you to connect with them.
So before I prepped for this talk,
I spent some time actually watching people play games.
Turns out great opportunities to work with many of you,
but also to get to see people play all the fun stuff
that you make.
And some observations are this-- mobile games,
by and large are still, on average, a very single player
experience.
This is a portrait of a child sitting on a couch
staring into a screen, very single player lonely type
of experience.
And whatever the little girl or the little boy is playing,
I promise you they won't remember a year from now
what they were playing.
And that's a weird kind of phenomenon for me
because when I reflect on the games of say the '80s and '90s,
I remember playing with friends.
I remember playing with families.
I remember running into random people at arcades
and enjoying a very social experience.
In the console biz, we created this kind of gamer archetype,
right?
It's the guy sitting in his basement
staring at a screen with a controller in his hand.
And we put a headset on this gamer persona
and we call that social.
But if you've played on those types of experiences,
that experience usually involves some 13-year-old screaming
something about your mother.
And that's not necessarily the best experience.
We did a little better.
And then there was briefly this phase in gaming
that we called social gaming.
We were all very excited about the possibilities
of bringing people together.
I don't know how you feel, but I never
had the day where sending a putty knife to my friends
was a fun experience.
And it just turns that we see less of those types of games
today as a result.
So the reality is that games are better than this, right?
Ignore video games for a moment.
We know that games have the capacity
to bring people together in a way
that other types of mediums and other types of entertainment
are not capable of.
And there's evidence around us when you just take a look.
I quote Greek philosophers to get immediate street cred,
you should too.
Plato uses this quote where, you can discover more
about a person in an hour of playing a game with them
then you can in a year of conversation.
It's a profound statement there, that perhaps
unlike any other kind of medium, you
can connect with people in a deeper way
with games then you can with any other action you can think of.
A more academic version of this is by a Dutch historian,
a guy named Johan Huizinga, if I can pronounce that correctly.
And in this quote-- his thesis of his seminal book called,
"*** Ludens," which if you're a Latin speaker, that loosely
translates into "man at play."
And the thesis of the book is that playing in its own right
helps develop us in ways that are
more fundamental to the person that we are.
It shapes our personalities, it shapes the relationships
that we create.
It even shapes the way that communities come together.
And even at a meta level the way nation states kind of work
with each other.
So all play, because we're attracted
to playing with each other, has meaning in that sense.
So it's a very profound kind of way of looking at it.
And what those quote are really supposed to demonstrate
is that playing games together are fundamentally
a human trait.
We build friendships around them.
We express ourselves through them.
We build a sense of belonging to a community when
we engage in those types of experiences.
And if I again use the physical world as a barometer for this,
there's some obvious examples here.
I investigated retiring.
It's actually fantastic.
I think I'm going to skip the whole work thing
and skip to retiring.
They're constantly playing games, right?
Card games and board games and anything
that they can get their hands on.
They don't just merely do it to pass away time.
The underlying tone here is it's really to help groups of people
meet each other.
And you would otherwise not know who this other person is
in this retirement community, but you build a relationship
through games.
Games also have the capacity to get large groups of people
to do really inane things.
This is a picture of-- so in the Northeast United States,
there's Wall Street in New York and it turns out
there's a neighborhood of people there.
And every year at Christmas, they
get together in do this annual freeze tag event.
And so if you know what the Northeast is like in the United
States-- there it gets actually pretty cold.
But somehow they get hundreds of people
out in the community to come and play freeze tag events
because it's compelling to come and play with a lot of people.
This is also a good example of a physical world.
At MIT, they have this annual mystery hunt
they've been running since the 1980s.
And I think in the last version, they
had about 2,000 participants with teams
ranging from 50 to 150 people.
And the goal of the mystery hunt is
you solve all these very archaic or arcane puzzles,
I should say.
And you eventually solve all these riddles
to learn where some hidden coin is around the campus.
And the reward for doing all of these crazy puzzles that
involve mental and maybe even real gymnastics
is that you get to write the puzzles for next year's event.
And you see this graph here where it just
shows the intensity of the teams that are participating in this
solving puzzles over a time series.
And it captures the essence of large groups of people coming
together to experience a really fantastic entertainment
experience.
And so the thesis is basically, at their best,
games bring us together.
And when I look back in video game history
there's really great examples of where we did this really well.
There's the arcades of old that brought together
random groups of people to play.
The more recent incarnation is the bar-cade.
Some genius decided that they'll take their love of arcades
and their love of alcohol and combine them
into one establishment.
And so I'm glad to see that kind of take a resurgence.
But living room multiplayer games-- we
remember games like "Goldeneye" and a lot
of the Nintendo products of old.
And of course, MMORPGs, which in my mind
are really just really elaborate chat
apps that have a game on top of it while you're playing it,
right?
And of them have these similar types of properties.
They bring people together and it
keeps people engaged in very deep way.
So if we accept that mobile games are largely still
single player experiences and playing games is human
and we've been better at this before, the question is,
can we change?
Can we be more effective?
And what my thesis is yes, we can.
And here's why.
You heard this stat from Michael this morning
where we have a billion active Android users.
This is 30-day actives, not totals.
That's a massive active community of people.
But use this stat as your next measure here.
Three in four of those users are playing games from Google Play.
That might be the largest group of people playing
games ever put together.
And it of course makes Google Play the best place
to grow and distribute your game in the mobile ecosystem today.
But what these two stats really tell
you is that really, everybody's a gamer now, right?
It's not a demographic in a box.
It's not just 18 to 35-year-old males.
Anybody can play a game because the device in your pocket
is capable of entertainment-- such rich entertainment.
And we have these cloud services that can actually
connect people together in a very deep way.
So the call to action to me is really clear.
Let's make our games social again.
Now here's the challenge.
If you have a billion active users,
how do you succeed in an ecosystem this large?
When you only had a few million users,
it became a lot easier to think about, well, what kind of game
am I making?
How am I going to connect with them?
When you get into the billions, it
becomes a much harder challenge.
And so this is the reason why we made Google Play Games.
This is Google's game network for Android iOS on the web.
And we announced recently that this game network
added 100 million users in just the last six months alone.
And that velocity, we're very confident in saying
that it's the fastest growing mobile game
network, perhaps ever.
And what's fascinating about Play games
is that it fills this really unique need
when you have an ecosystem this large.
And that is-- you're creating a concentrated network of people
who love playing games.
And as a result you want to be able to connect into that
and get your content exposed to them.
So since we launched it at Google I/O in 2013,
developers have been integrating services like achievements,
leaderboards, multiplayer gifts, and newer services
like saved games and quests to be
able to enhance the retention and engagement of their games.
And we know that games are doing better with those services
today.
More tangibly though, Play games gets
you access to very high quality gamers, people
who love playing games.
And that's the performance edge you need it in an ecosystem
like we all see today.
We know when we look at data for the developers who
have integrated game services-- and I'll
take this moment to say that if you have integrated them,
thank you, because you are the reason why we've
been successful and we love everything
that you've done with game services
and we want to see you do more.
But tangibly, we want to make sure
that the services are actually providing value.
It's not just something you throw into your game
because Google told you to.
We see these players, they play longer, they play more often,
and they monetize more frequently.
And that is a reason alone to make sure
that you get your game connected to those users.
And being able to see the double digit percentage
increases we've seen in session lengths and duration played.
And in some cases, revenue bumps depending
on the types of designs that you've chosen.
So this is where the question-- it's not merely a question of
did you integrate Play Games?
We all know that the game that your designed matters
and the thematics and how you approach your users still
works.
But how do you engage a billion people?
So we've done number of studies here
and one way to think about this is that in this ecosystem
there's an openness factor for how people want
to engage with social interactions.
So there's people who want to do very high levels
of social interaction and very low.
And so we have these three personas, right.
So I'll call them the competitor, the completionist,
and the stealth gamer.
And you can plot these personas, kind
of on that graph of social openness, right?
With your competitor being the most
open to being directly competing with other people,
to your completionist who's actually not
very interested in competing with others,
but is more interested in single player type interactions.
So I'll talk about these three personas in more depth.
So the competitor is an interesting kind of persona
because they'll engage in almost everything in your game, right.
It's achievements, it's leaderboards, it's multiplayer.
This is the person-- they own every console.
They set up their social media page
to brag about the achievements that they
earn from any platform they earn it on.
And they're really engaged and thrive in direct competition.
On the opposite side of the spectrum
we have these completionists, right.
These are people who don't really
like engaging in any kind of social activity.
However, they thrive in progressing through your game.
They want to be immersed in it, they
want to accomplish all the goals that you give them.
They want to see the storyline.
They want to finish everything.
This is like the mobile equivalent
of the gamer that wanted to earn the "Geometry Wars" million
point achievement without ever dying.
If you remember games like "Final Fantasy VIII,"
there was that one summon that you could do at the end
and it was like a two minute video
that you had to watch just to watch it cast.
And you had to complete every last corner
and inch of the game to be able to earn the right,
or the bragging rights to do that.
That's this person, and in mobile, they exist.
The last category here, and they're
kind of in the middle of this social openness
spectrum is what we call the stealth gamer.
This one's a tricky one because they're
the person you ask, hey are you a gamer, and they're like, nah,
I'm not a gamer.
But then when you look at them on a normal day
they're playing games every day.
This is like my mom, right.
She's like, no I don't play games.
But she's sitting there on her tablet every day
playing with random people.
And so what we know about this persona
is that they will engage in social interactions
but they will do so passively, right.
The social interactions have to be quick,
they have to be relatively frictionless.
Or you have to kind of involve them
in kind of like a community type of atmosphere
as opposed to making it more head-on
competition or something that they would otherwise
be frightened of.
So with these three personas, we can think of the tool kits
that we have with the games network
and how we can connect you to each one of them.
So I talked about the competitor persona.
The toolkit you have here-- an obvious one is leaderboards
and we can talk about turn-based multiplayer
and real-time multiplayer.
So the nice thing about our leaderboards
is that we have social and public leaderboards.
So public leaderboards are kind of for your hardcore audience
because there's a set of people who will always
compete to be number one.
For the average person, they might never be number one.
But I could be number one amongst my friends.
And so what's great about your competitors,
they're going to intuitively go for the top scores
but they're going to see their friends leaderboard and say,
hey, I want to compete with my friends.
They're more inclined to invite them,
it's more likely to turn into an acquisition for you.
And that's a fantastic reason for leaderboards
to be implemented into your games.
Encouraging the friends to be invited into the game
is just another way to not only engage the persona,
but to grow your game incrementally.
Real-time multiplayer-- if you're
building a synchronous game this is a fantastic technology
that gets you into the ecosystem in a very tangible way.
"NBA Jam" here-- if you remember that game
from the '90s, now on mobile.
They implemented our real-time multiplayer.
And what they use really effectively
is what we call our auto-matching feature.
And auto-matching-- the way to think about it
is that you're getting access to the hidden
social graph of the game.
It's basically connecting people who
are playing actively right now.
And so you see incredible boosts in engagement
because you're able to simulate the arcade interaction of old,
but on a mobile medium.
And so you'll play a game like NBA Jam,
you're playing one or two sessions, you bail out
and then seconds later you're connecting
with somebody else who's available to play right now.
For a more, let's say intimate experience,
you can still invite friends directly in the game
and this is kind of a screen shot of doing that.
Google will sort and rank users depending on your interaction
with them recently.
So recent players and active players
will show up at the top.
And friends who haven't yet come to play the game
are deprioritized in an effort to make
the match experience relevant.
For turn-based multiplayer, it largely
follows a similar type of model.
Turn-based multiplayer is much better for games
where the sessions can be played in increments.
So maybe it's over hours, or over days,
or it's literally a turn-style game.
Same type of thing, except when a turn is pending in the games
experiences that we have in the Play Games app
and inside the game themselves, this is a call to action
for me to come back.
So if I went on vacation or I just got busy
and I didn't decide to finish playing the game,
having that card sitting in my inbox that says,
hey Dan's turn started reminds me that I was playing this game
and is a call to action for me to come back
and that's an important retention point for you.
An important part of turn-based and real-time,
though, is the social discovery part of it.
And that is when somebody invites me,
I do get a notification across the entire Android ecosystem.
So the way that this works is that we prioritize
how noisy the notification is, depending
on whether I have a connection with them and their circles,
or whether I don't know them at all.
So here you can see Dan's invited me on the left here.
And I see his face and I see his name and it buzzes my phone
and it vibrates, and great, Dan's there,
I'm going to go and play a game.
But somebody can invite me who's not in my circles.
And I'll get a silent notification in the shade
and when I pull that down and I look at it,
it's like, OK, great, I'm going to go see who invited me
and understand that I want to play with them.
So when I dive into one of those notifications,
you'll get an experience not dissimilar to this, which
basically allows me to start a game with somebody
I know-- Dan on the left.
Or somebody I don't know-- this stranger on the right.
Not really a stranger.
And I can decide whether I want to play with them or not
or mute them or decline or whatever have you.
But here's the growth hack.
If I don't have the game, this will redirect you
to the Play Store.
And then someone's going to install your game,
start getting playing that they otherwise wouldn't.
And because it was introduced to me by a friend,
they feel a lot more inclined to start playing the game
because there's kind of a social angle
to, well if Dan likes the game, I should like the game too.
OK.
So we talked about the competitor persona.
There's the other side of the spectrum
which is the completionist.
There's two really important ways to engage this user
and we just see it time and time again through data.
Great achievement design and supports saved games.
Great achievement design-- the way
I always describe it is if I finish a game like "Hit Men Go"
is the game really done?
And I could just turn it away and forget about it.
But it turns out that when I add achievements to my game
it allows me to explain to users that there's more depth to it.
That there's more to do.
And so you can easily come back and you can see,
here's some achievements that I haven't quite finished.
They're still very incremental.
It gives me other types of objectives,
it calls me back into the game.
And we've seen games with great achievement design boost
monetization.
They've boosted engagement, they've retained their users
in a deeper way and consistently,
compared to games that don't implement achievements,
they outperform them almost every time.
If you want tips on good achievement design,
we have a YouTube video called, Game
On-- Achievement Point Pointers.
This is a good opportunity to take a picture of the screen.
If you don't take a picture of the screen, you can Google it.
It's a fantastic video by our resident, Todd Kerpelman,
who is a former Pogo designer.
I mentioned saved games.
So this is kind of intuitive, but you have these solo players
who increasingly, when they're very engaged,
are switching between devices.
Our saved game system works cross-platform.
And really, the point of doing this
is that you never want somebody to play level one again.
If they're going to switch a device or buy a new device,
the worst situation is you'll completely churn out your user
if they can't pick up where they left off.
Or my other favorite example-- I think we've all experienced
this-- is you get the support call if somebody says, hey
I thought that I would fix the game if I just uninstalled
and reinstalled it, like that works normally right?
And then you realize, oh wait a second,
you've lost all your data.
You've basically reset the game, there's
not very much I can do for you.
That's a bad experience.
Saved games completely removes this.
And we consistently see this as one of the top requests
from any one of our players in Play Games.
Easy to implement, brain dead from that perspective.
And here's what we added at I/O-- the ability
to attach cover images.
So you'll see here this is me playing "Leo's Fortune."
What they do is they take a screenshot
of where I last left off in the game.
So when I come back from vacation and I scroll through
and say, hey, what game do I want to go back to?
I see the screenshot that reminds me, yeah, that's right,
I did left leave off on level three.
I'm going to come back and I'm going
to pick that game over other ones
because I feel like I could go back and probably win
that level.
So it's kind of a digital bookmark
so that users can get called back into action
and help you get a little bit more of a re-engagement flavor
to your title.
While we're on the topic of growth hacks,
I want to insert this one.
And this is the concept of games your friends are playing.
This applies really to all the personas,
but I'll call out-- because the completionist is still
a play alone type of player, they're
still attracted to this.
There's something that's about, hey,
let me see what my friends are playing.
It's a way for me to discover games.
It's a denotion of maybe the games have a higher quality,
or whatever have you.
So you see a screen shot here.
We have the Play Games app where you can see games
that I've played recently, like "Brave Frontier" or "Frozen
Front."
Or in the store where you can see games
like "Heroes of Camelot" and "Sky Force."
This is a very strong call to action.
It's zero effort to you, other than implementing Play Games.
We take the signals, we pour them
into our discovery channels and help
your name get better discovered.
And so if you're into growth hacks,
finding those extra percentage points of additional user
acquisition, this is a very easy thing to do for your game.
OK.
And so that brings me to the stealth persona.
So we talked about how the stealth
persona is kind of tricky, right.
They don't like the direct social engagement,
so you can't use like the old memes of direct competition.
They don't think of themselves as a gamer,
but they play all the time.
But we have a few tools that we think
will constantly resonate with them.
So the first one is that we created a game gift system.
We know from our research that if the social interactions are
extremely discreet, very easy to get into,
and low friction Game Gifts is a way
to kind of trade a quick object between two players
and keep them engaged and invite them into the game.
And this service is pretty simple.
I can just kind of visualize it this way
is that when you implement it, players
select a gift that they send to another player.
We store if for seven days on our server.
And we send a notification in a similar type of way
that we do for multiplayer.
When the other user receives the notification, they tap through,
they select the gift that they want to play.
And similar to what we did in multiplayer.
It will ask them to install the game if they don't already
have it.
So it's a great opportunity for another social acquisition.
But it's also something that resonates with this persona
because I'm not getting challenged.
I'm not being put on the spot to be able to do this right away.
It's a very simple thing.
Oh, I'm receiving something from somebody.
That sounds kind of cool.
Don't send them putty knives, by the way.
I don't want any putty knives.
And then ultimately, they receive the gift,
they're elated, and they get engaged into the game.
And you can recreate the experience inside
of your own game like we do with any one of our other APIs.
Another service that we launched is called Quests.
And the way to think about Quests first of all,
it's a way to create time-based objectives in your game
without having to update the game.
And what it does is it creates this community feeling, right.
There's a lot of people doing this big kind of community
event on a weekend.
Sometimes this is referred to as live-off.
So this might be thought of as live-offs in a box.
But the way we've implemented this
is that it's analytics driven.
So the way Quest works is that you send the Quest system
events of what's going on in a game.
When somebody levels up, when they modify their sword, when
they find the rare black sheep in your game.
And through learning what players are doing inside
of the game, you can craft quests then
you run in a time span, like on a weekend,
or for an entire week based entirely off of that data.
I'll show you how this works.
So you start by defining a set of events
that happened in your game.
Let's say I'm making a zombie game
and I have red, green, and blue zombies.
And so I would fire an event every time somebody
killed one of those three colors of zombies.
And I integrated that in my game and the Quest interfaces
exists to show a user when a new quest is available.
Then I monitor those events.
So let's say I'm pretty satisfied with the number
of red zombies and green zombies being killed in the game,
but I'm not really happy with the number of blue zombies
being killed, because there's more monetization events tied
to them, they're harder to kill, people
have a tendency of buying more things in my game
because they're harder to kill in general.
So I can go into the developer console
and create a Quest that's like, hey, we're
going to have a 5,000 zombie blue zombie killing fest
this weekend.
And the Quest system will track every time somebody's completed
killing an existing blue zombie.
And when you accomplish that goal,
it can push down a custom blob of data to your game
that you can interpret and decide
how you want to reward your users.
So common examples would be a blob that says,
grant in-game currency to the user who succeeds.
Or give them some kind of in-game reward
or progress them through the game in a new type of way.
The best part about this, though,
is I didn't have to update my game at any moment in time.
It's entirely based on just sending the events
and the quests automatically populate
in the Quest UI that's integrated.
And so you could run these quests every day,
every week, every weekend and constantly reengage your users.
But use the data to decide which quests are the most effective,
and are you helping shape the behavior of your users in a way
that you're retaining and engaging them more?
We had one developer who showed their Quest data recently
and they saw users that engage in quests went on to do,
I think it was 160% more other types of sessions
in their game, just by virtue of engaging them in this way.
So I highly advise-- it's a dynamite feature
if you're in to live-ops.
Very easy to implement and everything
is documented on developers.google.com.
The last thing that I want to talk about
is, of course-- OK, we've got these three personas,
we have all these tools.
How do you know you're successful?
So you have to have a way to measure success.
So Google-- we're a very data driven company.
Game developers who were wildly successful
are also very data driven.
One way that we help you here is-- you're
familiar, probably with the statistics we have in the Play
console today.
But there's a separate game focused
set of statistics that are given to you just by virtue
of integrating Play games.
And so when you implement Play Games,
there's basically a zero effort dashboard that's given to you.
I'll dive into it a little deeper.
So for example, your daily dashboard
gives you a summary of your active users,
your new users, retention.
And more recently we've added demographic data.
The demographic data-- when we hear from developers
is essential because as a game designer you want to know,
hey, is this game actually resonating with the audience
I thought that was going to be playing it?
If I made a game that I expected females
between the ages of 18 and 30 to play,
I would hope my data would show that.
Another angle here is that if you're into user acquisition
and you're trying to come up with the right type
of creative assets, knowing what kind of demographic
your game has, in reality, can help
you decide what kind of creatives you use
and how you engage and go after the right audience.
Another essential here is our retention dashboard.
This is for your ability to retain new users.
So a common example here is that you
want to take a look at how many new users are coming back--
day one, day two, day seven, day 30.
And so you can kind of understand
the attrition rate of your game.
And let's say that you had a tutorial in your game
and you wanted to try and improve that in an effort
to help people get back on day one and day two more often.
Here you would see, you know, on March 8 here,
I did an update to my game the day before
and I saw a boost in my metrics because apparently my tutorial
was better at convincing people to stick around.
And that's a use case for this data.
Again it comes from just integrating Play Games
and having people sign in.
AUDIENCE: Do you have a formula for that?
GREG HARTRELL: The formula?
AUDIENCE: Yeah. [INAUDIBLE]
GREG HARTRELL: Yeah, this one's simple, right.
It's basically that you have a cohort of new users
that came in on a specific day.
Here's the percentage that came back day
one, day two, day three.
It's a simple multiplier.
The last one is in the engagement stats.
Today we support achievements and leaderboards.
So when you think about engaging these personas
you also want to use the data to know that you're effectively
doing that.
So you can see whether the achievements that you added
to your game recently are actually getting earned.
Whether they're too difficult, whether it
takes too long to earn them.
Or if you're into the competitor type of persona,
maybe you have a custom leaderboard
for some very special part of the game
and this is a way for you to get an indicator of whether they're
actually engaged in that content.
And whether the changes that you're making to your game
design are actually resonating with that type of user.
All right.
So I'll wrap up.
The summary today is basically this-- Google Play
games connects your game to a highly concentrated network
of very high quality gamers.
We have the services, achievements, leaderboards,
multiplayer, and gifts.
And the new stuff like saved games and quests.
And they're all showing us data that games are increasing
engagement and retention in very dramatic ways.
These players play longer, they play more often,
they monetize more frequently.
And the service can cater to those three personas
if you're very deliberate about in your design.
But going back to the beginning of this-- remember,
everybody's a gamer now.
We have a billion of them out there.
And that makes this a much more challenging, but also
a very exciting time for us.
Android and Google Play have created an ecosystem
that large that gives you that kind of opportunity.
And we know that games at their best have brought us together.
And so if I leave you with one message today
it's, go forth and make your game social.
And with that-- if you have any questions for me,
I'll be wandering outside, happy to talk with every one of you.