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Google Play Games app brings social gaming to Android

Google Play Games app brings social gaming to Android

By Anupam Saxena | Updated: 25 July 2013 13:37 IST

Google announced the Google Play Games app for its social gaming service, Play Games, at an event in San Francisco, where it unveiled the next generation Nexus 7 tablet and Android 4.3, the next iteration of its mobile OS.

The app which ships with the new Nexus 7 tablet, is also available on the Google Play Store, and allows users to browse recently played games including the ones being played by their Google+ friends, open games (installed on their device), or buy and download them. It also lets users see achievements that unlocked by them and their friends in each game, the achievements they've not been able to unlock and game leader boards. Users can set their favourite games and see which ones have been marked as favourite by their Google+ contacts. It also allows users to join and invite their friends to multiplayer games.

While a lot of this functionality was already available inside individual games, the Google Play Games app brings all the social gaming features under a single place and gives its background service a user facing interface.

The app can be downloaded via the Google Play Store.

The app is similar to Apple's Game Center app and service that also offers similar features. Besides Apple, Amazon also offers a similar service called GameCircle, while Microsoft offers the Xbox Live social gaming services.

While the exact number of games supporting Google's service is not known, the company said that 'hundreds' of games were offering this feature, and 'millions' of people were playing these games.

Google had first unveiled the service in May, and had announced that the service would also bring Cloud saves that provide a simple and streamlined storage API to store game saves and settings, to sync game levels and Real-time multiplayer functionality for easy addition of cooperative or competitive game play on Android devices through Google+ Circles. It had made Google Play game services available through an SDK for Android, and a native iOS SDK for iPhone and iPad games.

Games using the service include World of Goo, Super Stickman Golf 2, Beach Buggy Blitz, Kingdom Rush, Eternity Warriors 2, and Osmos.

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