Identity and account linking

Use Google Play Games Services authentication to streamline the user platform authentication experience for your game. Initialize the Play Games Services SDK to trigger authentication, which removes the need for a separate platform authentication flow.

Link user accounts to enable continuity and cross-device Play

Players engage with their favorite games across a variety of devices and platforms, including mobile, tablets, and PCs. A core expectation for these players is the ability to seamlessly resume their gameplay exactly where they left off, regardless of the device they choose.

A significant barrier that often leads to user abandonment is the requirement to sign in separately on each new device. Users need immediate immersion into the game experience, free from unnecessary interruptions.

To facilitate seamless continuity and cross-device play, you must implement two key features:

The Play Games Services authentication process provides flexible options for player identifiers. These options allow you to integrate Play Games Services with your own existing identity solution.

New Play Games Services integration

For games without existing Play Games Services integration, the Recall API simplifies backend setup by managing account associations and storing the connection between a user's game account and their Play Games Services account.

Account linking using Recall API

The Recall API is the recommended solution for linking user accounts in cross-platform games. This API is particularly useful for games without existing Play Games Services integration or those that use additional platform authentication solutions beyond Play Games Services.

The Recall API simplifies your game's backend setup by managing account associations.

  • Simplified backend: The API streamlines your game's backend setup for account linking.
  • Play-Managed associations: Play stores the association between users' game accounts (including third-party accounts) and their Play Games Services accounts.
  • Progress restoration: Developers generate and send Recall tokens to Play, which can then be retrieved to restore a user's game progress.

When implementing the Recall API, developers must verify that Recall tokens are opaque strings. These tokens must be free of any sensitive or personally-identifiable information (such as name, email address, or demographics) about gamers.

Games must use robust encryption algorithms when generating Recall tokens to protect user data and maintain security.

To learn more about how Recall works, see Recall API .

To implement the Recall API feature, see Integrate the Play Games Services Recall API within your game.

Manage multiple accounts with Recall API

When managing multiple accounts for the same user, you can treat each account as a distinct persona. This approach allows for tailored experiences based on the user's specific context.

To implement this approach, follow these steps:

While various policy options are available (such as automatically restoring the last account), we strongly recommend presenting a prompt to the user. This prompt should ask them to select which account they want to restore, providing a clear and user-friendly experience.

Existing Play Games Services integration

This section explains how to integrate your game with Play Games Services by binding player accounts. Learn how to use player IDs to identify authenticated players and manage multiple game accounts for a single Play Games Services user.

Bind with a Player_id

A player ID is an identifier for a Play Games Services player account. Your game can retrieve a player ID for any player who is authenticated into your game using Play Games Services.

The games that have the backend set up with Play Games Services Player_Id or the games that require support for child users, should use Player_Id and bind their game and 3P accounts with Player_Id.

Understand how player IDs behave:

  • Consistent within a game: A player ID remains consistent for a user across multiple devices when they play the same game.
  • Inconsistent between games: Player IDs are not always consistent when a user plays different games.

For more information, see next generation Player IDs.

Manage multiple accounts per user with binding

To link multiple user accounts to a single Play Games Services account, create a one-to-many mapping in your table.

Cross-platform Google identity

You can implement a cross-platform (Android and iOS) identity solution using Sign-in-with-Google (SiWG).

Choose from the following options based on the experience you want for your users.

Recall with Sign-in-with-Google

To provide a consistent and seamless sign-in experience for your users, integrate SiWG with Play Games Services by following these steps:

  • Implement SiWG across platforms. Deploy SiWG on both Android and iOS to offer users a unified sign-in screen.
  • Generate and send tokens on Android. On Android, use the Recall API to generate SiWG tokens. Send these tokens to Play Games Services.
  • Restore user progress. Play Games Services securely stores the link between the user's Play Games Services account and their SiWG identity. You can retrieve this linking information to restore user progress, similar to other third-party identity solutions.

Bind with openid or email

To streamline the user experience, you can implement an alternative authentication strategy that avoids explicit sign-in for Android users. This approach leverages Play Games Services authentication on Android while retaining SiWG for iOS.

Key aspects of this setup include:

  • Android Authentication: Your game initializes the Play Games Services SDK to trigger authentication automatically on Android devices.
  • iOS Authentication: For iOS users, continue to display the standard SiWG prompt.
  • Cross-Platform Identifiers: Play Games Services now provides openid and email scopes, identical to those offered by SiWG. These scopes are crucial for establishing consistent cross-platform user identifiers.
  • Account Binding: To create a unified user experience across platforms, you must bind users' other accounts with the openid or email provided by Play Games Services.