Focusing our Google Play games services efforts

Posted By James Smith, Product Manager, Google Play



In order to help developers make great games and build their businesses, we
offer Google Play Games Services (GPGS). GPGS provides powerful tools to build, analyze and retain your audience and optimize your
game. After listening to developer feedback and examining usage, we have decided
to remove some of the features so we can focus on making our offering more
useful.




In December, we
announced the end of support for the creation of new iOS accounts given the
low usage of GPGS on iOS. Additionally, our latest Native SDK release (2.3) will
no longer support integration with iOS and going forward we will not be
supporting or updating the iOS SDK.




We've also examined the features that GPGS offers. While developers use
engagement and reporting tools extensively, there is lower usage for Gifts,
Requests, and Quests. We therefore plan to stop supporting Gifts, Requests, and Quests. In
order to help developers that do use these features plan for their removal, we will leave them open for 12 months, deactivating them by 31st March 2018. We'll
be continuing support for other features such as Sign-in, Achievements,
Leaderboards and Multiplayer.




Play games services remains an important part of the tools we provide
developers, and we're working hard on future GPGS updates. We continue to be
strongly committed to providing high quality services for Games, including new
tools such as official
Firebase support for Unity and C++ developers, and integration
with Firebase Analytics. These changes allow us to focus our efforts on the
services developers value most to build high quality, engaging games.

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