Imagine if you can play a game from Google Play Store in a matter of seconds, regardless of its big size, while its downloading is quite interesting. And luckly you won’t have to wait longer to expercience it on your Android phones as Google has announced a interesting new feature “Play as You Download” to improve the gameplay experience for its upcoming Android 12, that will give player a ability to play a 400MB game just after 10 seconds of starting the download (cool right!).
This new game streaming technology was disclosed during a keynote for Android Games Developers hosted by product management director Google, Greg Hartrell. The “Play as You Download” feature uses an intelligent background download system and allows users to play games while downloading. This feature is designed to cut the waiting time for players to play the game (simila to what EA is testing for its PC games).
In the keynote, the company added that the play button becomes active as soon as the player hits the install button in the Google Play Store while remaining assets will be downloaded in the background intelligently and when the game finishes downloading, the gameplay Will not be interrupted. You can see a example below in which, the “Play” button appears after 18% of total 127MB download.
Now you might be familar with Google Play “Instant Apps” that allows users to try an application without downloading it, but the difference in the feature “Play as you download” is that Google will be taking care of everything instead of developers after the they upload their game on Googl Play Store. This new feature is going to be a part of the Android App Bundle and will be required for any newly published Android game in the Google Play Store from August.
Apart from this, the company has also declared some other new features including a new game dashboard for Android 12, that will give access to some tools like screen capture, screen recording, and many more.