Mobile game developers will soon have a new tool to lure players to their latest releases.
At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, Google announced a new feature called "Playables" for iOS and Android developers. It allows users to test-drive a lightweight version of a game within an advertisement. In other words, there's no app download required—and it all happens while you're in another game.
So much for our attention spans.
Playables is one of the formats available in Google's Universal App Campaigns, a tool that allows developers to have their ads placed across several Google properties just by writing a few lines of text. It's currently available to some advertisers, but the tech giant plans to start rolling it out to all Universal App Campaign clients soon, a spokesperson for Google said, so you can expect to see the feature more often.
Playables could eliminate the hassle of downloading a game only to figure out that it's kind of terrible, though Google admits the the feature was created mainly for developers. In addition to giving them an additional tool to reel in new customers, Playables can also encourage existing users to play a game even more than they already do.
A Google rep wouldn't say whether it plans to develop a similar feature for non-gaming apps but did say, "We anticipate that marketers and ad agencies will get very creative on how they use Playables to drive downloads as well as brand awareness and sales."
CORRECTION March 3, 2017, 1:52 p.m. EST This article originally stated that Playables is available for Android developers. It is also open to iOS developers.
Topics Google Advertising
