Google Announces Play Store Changes to Help Promote Great Games

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While a lot of Android publications are currently talking about Mobile World Congress 2017 from Barcelona, there’s also another big convention going on right now: The Game Developers Conference is currently happening too, and since Google has their hand in mobile gaming, it makes sense for them to be there right now as well. Along with 5 new games that Google just announced are available for pre-registration, they also announced some new tools to help good mobile games get discovered more often.

The first new feature that will be seen by both developers and the end user is the ability to show that a game in the Play Store is on sale. Some parts of the Play Store currently do things this way right now (like Movies and Books), but we haven’t had this feature available for music or applications/games yet. Earlier this month Google did a small test with a select number of developers that allowed them to put their game on sale and display this price change right on the application page.

Google said developers saw an increase of 3x–20x in sales from this pilot program since the user was actually aware that the game was on sale. This will even let developers offer their games for free for a short time while being able to revert it back to its paid price once the promotion is over. Google also talked about how they’ve been tweaking the discovery algorithm of the Play Store to help promote games based on engagement instead of just the number of installs it has.

Not only will this help the better games get improved visibility, but it will also help to prevent the developers who pay for application installs from gaming the system. The last thing Google talked about here will be them curating more high quality games and promoting them through editorial pages. This will launch later this month and will allow their editors to hand-pick games that provide value to the community.