Google I/O is this coming Tuesday but they still can’t seem to keep a lid on things. With a three hour keynote you’d think they would have enough time to fit it all in, but something has hopped out of their cauldron of tricks. An new updated version of their Google Play Services app includes something called “Play Games”.
Android Police managed to score a copy of the new Google Play Services v3.1.36, which is very slowly rolling out to devices right now. For comparison, the current Play Services that most people have is v3.0.27. 3.1 is a massive update – the strings file, for instance, has more than doubled from 300 to 700 entries. This is how Google is pushing out all the shared files for Google Play Games,
With this being said, this means we could be seeing cloud saved games like that on iOS to access them across multiple devices, and it’s game center but also a new social aspect to get other friends involved.
Although some of these new features such as invitations and such, it looks as though Google is going for a big push in the social integration of it’s Google + network. It also looks as though we’re going to have a mix of Game Center’s matchmaking and leaderboards (by day, week and month) and the Windows Achievements bundled in with this in Google’s own way.
With Google I/O just days away this will more than likely be one of the few things they’ll talk about and hopefully we’ll get more of an insight on what this update can do then.
