Google has announced “play as you download”, a new feature coming on Android 12 devices that will let you play games while downloading them.
Google’s Google Play division made the announcement during the Google for Games Summit keynote on Monday, which would have normally taken place during the Game Developers Conference in March but was altered due to the the pandemic changed the plans, and Google broke it off from the online-only GDC that takes place next week.
Greg Hartrell, the product management director for Google Play and Android, while speaking to journalists said that the new download feature greatly speeds up the download and play process.
“It enables you to get into gameplay in seconds from the store listing while the game continues to download in the background,” Hartrell said. “This is a vastly improved user experience in Android 12. We saw 400MB games becoming available in the last 10 seconds instead of many minutes. And that’s because we’re streaming assets intelligently in the background.”
On the download feature, Google has also created Play Asset Delivery which will ensure players spend less time waiting for downloads without sacrificing the quality of a game. Now, Texture Compression Format Targeting automatically figures out what modern compression formats to use to further reduce a game’s size.
Google Play also revealed a new game dashboard for players to quickly access important settings while playing games.
