GDC – Game developers conference is world’s largest and longest running professional – only game industry event. This year GDC was presented from March 17, 2014 to March 21, 2014 in San Fransisco. Google Developer Day was an event presented by Google team at GDC this year on March 18, 2014. This event was streamed live over YouTube.
Summary of Google Developer Day event 18th March 2014 – Presented by Google Team
- They explained about Google Play Game services
- Game services helps to build game with features like
- Achievements
- Leatherboard
- Cloud save feature
- Real time multi player game
- Push notifications
- Game services supports for iOS as well
- Turn based multi player game
- Dividing game users into 3 types –
- Competitor – Uses social to invite friends, multi players based social discovery with real-time expanded notifications
- Achiever – Badges can be announced for such kind of users
- Self gamer – Who plays for self. Not social but plays daily
- Badges for the users
- sending gift cards maybe in the form of extra life in game to the friends
- showing inbox requests in the app
- Gifting for trades
- Google play game services are cross platform (both iOS and Android)
- AdMob Monetization
- Understand the audience of the game/app
- Segment audience into different groups maybe age groups
- Applying different strategies in the app or game updates to different age groups to attract them back on game/app
- Understanding value of users
- AdMob now comes with Google Analytics
- Taking right action when it matters at right time depending on analytics results
- Ad network optimizations and live cpm tracking
- Best to monetize is – log useful data and events on Google analytics, analyze data collected, promote and monetize
- You wont maximize revenue unless you monitor and act on rise and fall of each network cpm
- In-app purchase
- Find out premium users
- Find out non-premium users
- Find our users played in last 24 hours
- Find out users who are stuck on particular game level say level 10
- Find out users who fail
- After such segmentations different in-app promotions can be shown to respective users
- Selling item to the users via in – app purchase
- Example – ask users to pay for removal of block which is causing them to fail in particular level all the time
- Build relationship and lasting re-engagement
- Embrace gamer friendly Ads experience
- Support for emerging, high value formats of Ads like Videos Ads.
- Location based Ads
- Turning users into customers – Four groups of users
- Engaged but monetized
- Engaged but not monetized
- neither engaged not monetized
- monetized but not engaged
- Try to get more users into engaged and monetized category
- Collect data what matters in your app, see what is engagement in your app
- Logging events about transaction details, product details to get analytics about those over Google Analytics
- Unlock revenue analytics on Google Analytics
- Depending on analytics prices can vary for in-app purchases, products or ads or in app promotions
- Define multiple sales models in the game or app
- Ad network – First line to defence Google display network –> no sales –> pure profit
- direct sales – Publishers hire sales people –> sell your inventory directly to maximize returns
- real time bidding – Reach a massive pool of demand
- Always analyze data to get insight for
- Segmentation of users
- revenue
- device and app version
- acquisition of source
- Use of Google Tag Manager (GTM) for mobile apps – Ads settings, network settings, game play values, UI setting, content, specifying transactions in GTM
- Google Glass
- Design for specific for Glass
- Keep it relevant to the Glass
- Data being sent to the user can be categorized into – forever, last year, last month, NOW.– This now is for Glass as Glass works on timeline.
- Avoid unexpected and unpleasant in Glass design
- Build for people. Think from user’s perspective what they would like to see on Glass like devices
- Do not design app for Glass. Design data to be sent on Glass timeline for app which might be on another device (Android /iOS)
- Voice command should be used to actually open actions (Get directions to…) and not to open application
- Do not just port your mobile apps to the glass as purpose of glass is totally different that mobile device
- Test your glass design indoor and outdoor as images look different in different environment on glass
- Establish hierarchy of colors (mentioned on glass developer sites colors to be used for glass design)
- Test glass apps at different locations
- Make it glance-able
- Design single interaction to be faster than 4 seconds
- Design for people’s emotions, include others in fun
I think this event has definitely given direction to the developers to think about better strategies in their games and mobile applications for monetization. Looking forward to explore many aspects of Google Analytics which will now come with AdMob SDK.
