Get Started with Play Games Services for Android

Note: This guide is for the Play Games Services v2 SDK. For information on the previous SDK, see the Play Games Services v1 documentation.

Welcome to Android game development with the Google Play games services!

The Play Games SDK provides cross-platform Google Play games services that lets you easily integrate popular gaming features such as achievements, leaderboards, and Saved Games in your tablet and mobile games.

Before you begin

To prepare your app, complete the steps in the following sections.

App prerequisites

Make sure that your app's build file uses the following values:

• A minSdkVersion of 19 of higher
• A compileSdkVersion of 28 or higher

Set up your game in Google Play Console

The Google Play Console is where you manage Google Play games services for your game, and configure metadata for authorizing and authenticating your game. For more information, see Setting Up Google Play Games Services.

Configure your app

In your project-level build.gradle file, include Google's Maven repository and Maven central repository in both your buildscript and allprojects sections:

  buildscript {
    repositories {
      google()
      mavenCentral()
    }
  }

  allprojects {
    repositories {
      google()
      mavenCentral()
    }
  }

Add the Google Play services dependency for the Play Games SDK to your module's Gradle build file, which is commonly app/build.gradle:

  dependencies {
    implementation "com.google.android.gms:play-services-games-v2:+"
  }

You can move onto the sign-in documentation for next steps on setting up Play Games Services v2 Sign In.