Tag: google mobile gaming

Google is bringing mobile games to larger screens.

The massive internet company is not giving up the television playing field to Amazon Fire TV and Apple TV and has its own plans to attract users with Android TV, which, among other features, enables users to engage in mobile gaming on a big screen.

Android TV was announced at Google’s I/O developer conference.

The company held its annual I/O developer event last week in San Francisco on Wednesday, June 25, 2014. During the event, they made several announcements, including their Android TV platform, which Google has designed to work specifically with television sets and is powered by its open source operating system. This is what sets it apart from Amazon and Apple’s TV products.

Android TV is a platform, not a product. Google intends to work with different vendors to have its platform directly integrated into television set top boxes from Razer, Asus, etc. and into TV sets from companies such as Sony.

Android TV will enable users to access and use mobile apps on their TV screens. This means that mobile games will be an accessible option. This is big news, considering 70% of the over 1 billion devices that run Android across the globe, access a minimum of one game during the course of one month. Furthermore, ever since Google announced in 2013 the hub app for Android-based gaming, in the last six month, 100 million users have signed up.

Android TV could have a significant impact on the mobile gaming industry.

The games that were demoed on Android TV during the conference were controlled using Android tablets. Although Google made no mention of making game controllers, it is leaving this option open to its hardware partners.

According to Greg Hartrell, Google Play Games Lead Product Manager, “when the Android TV platform gets adopted, OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] are going to push out a game pad kind of form factor.” He added that “OEMs will bring a variety of different form factors. They’ll continue to grow the ecosystem.”

Google believes that mobile gaming has room to grow on a technological level, as well as on a physical level – beyond the screens of smartphones and tablets. One of the advantages of Android TV is that there is a vast amount of content on Google Play. It will also encourage developers to think about how their games will not only appear on phones and tablets, but on large screens, too.

The highly popular Google augmented reality using game tech will be used to create other apps.

Increasingly, users are proving that they love the AR mobile gaming experience and this is causing the technology to move forward extremely rapidly in order to be able to take advantage of the keen interest that consumers have, while the market remains somewhat limited.

Developers want to be among the first in order to make their names before the market is swamped.

Google’s Niantic Labs is a good example of one of the developers that has taken AR mobile gaming technology to an extremely successful level. In fact, the popularity of its massive game, Ingress, has shown that the world is ready to start playing with augmented reality on a more mainstream level. Though this came with a tremendous beta experience and has now been officially launched, there is another large potential for this success.

Though this particular app may not have an expanded future it will become an AR mobile gaming platform

Despite the considerable success of this augmented reality game, Niantic Labs has expressed that it will be winding down the storyline of this game that changes the landscape of the real world into a global game experience of intrigue, mystery, competition.

Soon, it will become a platform onto which other augmented reality using experience can be developed. Niantic Labs is already working on creating the kits that are necessary to give developers what they need to be able to create their own games that will use location information, with a chat layer, and if needed in game adds can also be included.

However, it should be noted that game developers shouldn’t get themselves too excited about coming up with their own AR mobile gaming experience quite yet, as Niantic still doesn’t have a predicted time by which the tools and kits will become available. It is all based on the team’s flexibility. Naturally, they are hoping that they will be released sooner, rather than later, but as of yet, there is no idea as to what the launch date is going to be.