Google Play Games is a pretty decent service when built-in to a game, offering a number of great features, but apparently some of those features aren’t really used and Google has announced this morning they will be removing them.
According to Google, the big one here is the removal of support for iOS for Google Play Games Services GPGS, moving forward. Google has removed the support for iOS thanks to what they say is a lack of interest and the result of developer feedback.
Also as a result of developer feedback, Google will be removing Gifts, Requests, and Quests from GPGS for Android. Google will phase these out over the next year, with support ending on the 31st of March 2018. Google also cited a lack of usage of those functions as a reason for removal.
Features that will remain in GPGS include Account Sign-in, Achievements, Leaderboards and Multiplayer.
In the announcement post, James Smith, Product Manager, Google Play has announced that analytics will be a strong part of Google Play moving forward, with Firebase Analytics already baked into GPGS. Firebase also now natively supports Unity and C++ developers.
There’s a lot of changes about to hit Google Play Games, and hopefully they’ll be for the better.
I wish there was an option to opt out of Google Play Games altogether. So many games seem to make signing into the service a pre-requisite to playing the game at all, yet I have no interest in any of the services available. It would be different if GPGS actually enabled backing up of game progress, something that is sorely lacking in the Android world.
It does enable backing up of game progress. A few games I use back up through it which is great. Also only ever found 1 that used quests and had 1 a month but stopped after 3 and never saw any more.
Hmmm, I’ll have to go digging for the progress back up then! Thanks. I assume this will be on a game by game basis, depending on the developer.
Yeah, game by game. Apparently only a few lines of code to add. It’s stored in Google Drive but in a place that you can’t see the files, and doesn’t count towards your space. I forget how you view it, either from the app or PC view. I think only one showed it to you.