Gaming on a smartphone doesn’t compare to gaming on a dedicated console like the XBOX or PlayStation, for obvious reasons. Your phone can only be so big, whereas you can buy the largest high def television that’ll fit through your front door. Another thing that dedicated consoles do is provide gamers with a complete gaming ecosystem with features such as leaderboards, friends, in-game chat, and so on and so forth.
Apple tried, hard, to bring those gaming features to iOS with Game Center, but it’s just an incredibly hideous application. That and developers don’t really want to integrate with Game Center when there are so many other viable gaming services out there like OpenFeint. Enter Google. According to Android Police, the company will introduce a new service called “Google Play Games” at I/O later this week that aims to bring XBOX Live like features to Android phones. The guys at AP got their hands on the Play Games APK files and tore it apart. They say there are things in there like game syncing, achievements, leaderboards, game matches, leaderboards, and again, all the stuff you’d expect in a dedicated console. Truth is, no matter how good of a system Google provides developers, if they don’t use it then it’s useless. That and, let me be perfectly frank, most game development houses take iOS far more seriously than Android. Little reminder: I was an iPhone user until roughly three months ago, and I can’t put into words how hard it’s been for me to find games that are comprobable in quality to the titles I used to enjoy on iOS. Will that change thanks to “Google Play Games”? I can only hope.
