GamesBeat Summit: Google for Games on the new global opportunities for mobile game devs

venturebeat.com:

There are 3 billion monthly active devices across the world, a vast global audience more eager for gaming content than ever before.

“You have these global companies minting new billion-dollar businesses all the time,” said Greg Hartrell, product director, Android and Google Play, at Google for Games during his panel at GamesBeat Summit 2022. “I admire developers like Garena in Singapore, Moonton, Com2uS, who have embraced the size of the ecosystem, the scale of it, and are being thoughtful about how they enter into a market globally, from their content to their pricing to the way that [they] reach the entire world of addressable devices.”

Hartrell and Dean Takahashi, lead writer at GamesBeat, spoke about the global mobile game market, what developers need to do to be successful, and more, during their panel.

Three big changes in the mobile gaming world, in genres, devices, and ads, have made the opportunities for developers even richer. Firstly, in an ecosystem this size, there’s no such thing as an average user, which is a far cry from the traditional gaming audience, from which all gamer bro clichés were born.

“At Xbox it was implied that we were making games for 18-35-year-old males who wanted to either punch each other in the face or shoot each other in the face,” Hartwell said. “And what mobile really did is it blow open the idea that you’d get all these different genres.”

With the explosion of mobile devices, developers now have a whole new platform to offer up their game — and new audiences to engage, especially in geos where smartphone penetration has new gamers coming online in bigger numbers than ever. Tools like the Android game development kit make optimizing more efficient than ever.

Finally, developers have been