ay Games plays catchup with cloud saves, quests, gamer profiles

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Published 25 Jun 2014

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Saving games to the cloud online gamerscores are now staples of most modern gaming platforms. Now you can add to that list, too.

At the I/O conference on dnesday, Ellie wers, a product manager in charge of ay, said that would be adding new features to its ay Games platform in a bid to make it even more compelling. 

ay Games is the fastest-growing games platform of all time, according to wers, with 100 million new users joining the platform in the past six months. Since last year’s I/O, has paid out more than $5 billion to developers on ay, said Sundar chai, who runs ’s Android business. That’s about 2.5 times the growth from the year before, he said.

google io game profile

ay’s new Game ofile.

On dnesday, added a new Game ofile, which changes automatically according to the games you play the achievements you complete. “It makes playing games more fun,” wers said.

Since last year, gamers have loved saving their progress in the cloud, now, gamers will be able to save “bookmarks” of their progress in the ay Games app in the Saved Games section. at these bookmarks mean, how they’ll differ from an actual saved game, is unknown. It may be, however, that they will be a “snapshot” or saved state by which users can backtrack in a game. In a demonstration, wers showed an actual snapshot of her playing a level in a game.

google io saved games

Users will also be able to record “snapshots,” or saved games, using ay.

is also adding a feature that will benefit developers gamers alike: an A that will allow developers to set daily quests, such as collecting a set amount of in-game items. If they do so, gamers can be rewarded—all without the developer needing to issue a daily app update. Some games—wers didn’t specify which—have already been upgraded with Quests, she said.

The Quests, Saved Games, ofile features will be rolled out in the next portion of the Games services the ay Games app. en? “Soon,” wers promised. 

will also roll out mobile carrier billing to tablets, exping that capability from the phone. In other words, if you’ve set up carrier billing on your phone, it will work on your tablet—even if it’s -Fi only. Carrier billing means that if you buy an app from the store, or make an in-app purchase, those charges show up on your cellular phone bill, instead of hitting your credit card one by one.

ay has already evolved to offer a serious challenge to Apple’s iOS in terms of gaming. th more revenue opportunities for developers more gaming-centric features for gamers themselves, it hopes to become more powerful yet. 

’re still left with a question, though—if Android wants to become a gaming platform, where were the developers? Hardware like the new Razer microconsole means little if developers don’t sign on— hasn’t taken advantage of either the E3 show or its I/O to showcase any hot new games being developed for the Android platform.