Test and publish your game

To ensure that Google Play Games Services are functioning correctly in your application, you should test your Play Games Services before publishing your game changes on Google Play.

Enable accounts for testing

If your game is in an unpublished state, you must allowlist the user accounts that you want to grant access for testing. Otherwise, your testers will encounter OAuth and 404 errors when attempting to access the Play Games Services endpoints such as sign-in.

There are two ways to enable testers to use PGS APIs for your game:

  • At an individual level, by adding individual email addresses.
  • At a group level, by enabling Play Games Services for a Play Console release track.

To add individual testers to your game project:

  1. In the Google Play Console, select a game.
  2. Open the Testers tab for your game in the Google Play Console (Grow > Play Games Services > Setup and management > Testers).
  3. Click the Add testers button.
  4. In the dialog that appears, enter the email addresses of the Google Accounts that you want to add as testers (separated with commas or one email address per line).
  5. Click Add to save the users as testers. The tester accounts you added should be able to access your Play Games Services within a couple of hours.

To give testing access to a group, enable a release track to access PGS:

Google Play distributes pre-release versions of your app to controlled groups of trusted users with the release track features. See Set up an open, closed, or internal test to learn more about testing with release tracks.

You can grant access to test your game to all users who have access to test APKs on a given release track. This works the same as if you had added them to the tester list individually. To do this, follow these steps:

  1. In the Google Play Console, select a game.
  2. Open the PGS Testers section (Grow > Play Games Services > Setup and management > Testers) and select the Release tracks tab. On this page, you can also see the list of tracks that are already enabled for PGS testing.
  3. Click Add tracks.
  4. Select one or more tracks to enable for PGS testing.
  5. Click Add Tracks.

The selected release tracks now appears on the list of tracks enabled for PGS testing.

Publish game changes

Once you are ready to share your latest game changes with players, it's time to publish them. Publishing your game changes makes the Play Games Services that you have configured available to public users of your game. This is different from publishing your game APK and won't display any information about your game on the Play Store. Instead, it means that all users with your game APK will be able to access Play Games Services features, such as sign-in, without needing to be added individually as a tester or be given access to a release track.

It can take up to 2 hours for Play Games Services changes made in Play Console to be ready for end users. Ensure that your Play Games Services game project is published at least 2 hours before your game goes live on the Play Store, or users may have trouble using Play Games Services features (including sign-in). Publishing your Play Games Services game project enables Play Games Services for your game. However, it does not make your game available or visible on the Play Store.

To publish your Play Games Services changes:

  1. In the Google Play Console, select a game.
  2. Open the Publishing section for your game in the Play Console (Grow > Play Games Services > Setup and management > Publishing), then follow the instructions on that screen to publish your game.
  3. If there are missing or incorrectly configured items that are preventing you from publishing your game, the Publishing section will tell you what those items are so that you can fix them.

The data for listed testers for the game is not automatically deleted when you publish the game changes. To delete data for testers, use the Play Games Services Management APIs.