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Recap of other Android gaming news from Google’s Keynote

Yesterday was the keynote for Google’s 2014 developer conference, Google I/O. They’ve touched on several topics, some of which have gaming relevant ramifications. For starters, with the next OS upgrade (currently called “L”), they touched on two things that will benefit gaming: graphics and battery life. With the former, Google demo-ed some game footage running on the Unreal 4 engine (which currently is for PCs). For the latter, Project Volta was announced to help slow down battery drain by showing users more information about where battery drain is going. While this isn’t directly game-related, more juice means more gaming.

Android TV looked very promising for future Android gaming, demoing some cool gaming that included multiplayer between TV and handset. For commercial releases, there were three manufacturers that they mentioned specifically releasing TVs that come integrated with Google TV in the near future: Sony is supposed to be releasing one this year, and Sharpe and TPVision were slated to release models in 2015. We will be going into detail about Android TV later today.

Google Play Games was covered as well, and they spoke about some new features. They indicated that it’s now the fastest growing gaming service. For upcoming features, players will be able to establish profiles in the GPG app, as well as see progress of games played by viewing “bookmarks” from within the app. Quests is a new feature that is an online service so players can collect certain items in participating games on certain days. Google stated that these features should roll out in updates for Google Play Services and Google Play Game apps.

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