Google Play to kill support for Gifts, Requests, and Quests to streamline services

In a bid to streamline its services and to make its offerings more useful, Google has decided to remove some of the features from its mobile game developer offering Google Play Games Services (GPGS). The company has announced plans to stop supporting Gifts, Requests, and Quests come March 31, 2018.

Though Google did not specify how many developers or games would be affected by this feature cut but cited the lower rate of usage for these features as the reason behind the call.

"While developers use engagement and reporting tools extensively, there is lower usage for Gifts, Requests, and Quests. We, therefore, plan to stop supporting Gifts, Requests, and Quests," Google said in an official blogpost. For developers that do use these features, the company is giving them 12 months to plan for their removal.

GPGS offers tools to build, analyse, and retain gamers. Google said the change comes after “listening to developer feedback and examining usage” and that it will be able to “focus on making our offering more useful.” The plan is to continue supporting features such as Sign-in, Achievements, Leaderboards, and Multiplayer.

"We continue to be strongly committed to providing high-quality services for Games, including new tools such as official Firebase support for Unity and C++ developers, and integration with Firebase Analytics. These changes allow us to focus our efforts on the services developers value most to build high quality, engaging games," the company further added.

Notably, this is the second major cut Google has made to GPGS in past few months. In December, it announced the end of support for the creation of new iOS accounts given the low usage of GPGS on iOS. It also added that its latest Native SDK release (2.3) will no longer support integration with iOS and going forward will not be supporting or updating the iOS SDK.