Rewards

Play Games Rewards are in-game items that can be distributed to your players as incentives and rewards to drive increased engagement from the Google Play Games platform through experiences like Quests and Social Challenges.

There are two types of Play Games Rewards:

  • Single Use Rewards: These are high-value, unique rewards that are restricted to a single-use quantity per player. These types of rewards will be used for single-use experiences like Quests.

    Examples:

    • Cosmetic items like skins, avatars or profile badges.
    • Exclusive items like characters or weapons.

  • Repeatable Rewards: These are lower-value, repeatable rewards that are issued in a larger volume and players can redeem more than once.

    Examples:

    • In-game currency like coins, gems or event tokens.
    • Performance boosters like temporary XP boosts, multipliers.
    • Energy refills or consumable resources.

Play Games Rewards requirements

The following are requirements for Play Games Rewards:

  • Rewards need to be available for every player in the published regions for your game.
  • Rewards need to be meaningful or desirable for players.
  • Developers need to create or nominate SKUs in Play Console to be used as Play Games Rewards.
  • Developers need to integrate with the out of app purchase flow using the Play Billing Library to give users in the game rewards that have been granted. Developers are responsible for ensuring the rewards are granted to the right in-game identity.

Integrate Play Games Rewards

Add, manage, and deliver Play Games Rewards one-time product offers used by Google Play as incentives to drive engagement for your game.

Add a Play Game Reward

Play Games Rewards (for both single use and repeatable rewards) are one-time product offers that have been created with the purpose of being distributed by Google Play. Once created, Google Play will use these offers as incentives and rewards to drive increased engagement for your game.

To create a one-time product offer for Play Games Rewards, complete these steps:

  1. In the Google Play Console, select a game.
  2. Navigate to Monetise with Play > Products > One-time products.
  3. Select one or more available one-time products from the list that represents the entitlement you want to associate and create a new offer that represents the Play Games Rewards for your game.
    1. If you don't have any one-time products showing in this list, then you must first create some by navigating to Monetise with Play > Products > One time products and follow these instructions.

Remove a Play Games Reward

If you no longer want a SKU to be available to be used as a reward:

  1. Go to Monetise with Play > Products > One-time products.
  2. Select the specific SKU and associated "Play Game Reward" offer and make that offer inactive.

Ensure a Play Games Reward is delivered in game

Play will grant a player a Play Games Reward after they have successfully completed an engagement mechanism, such as a Quest, for your game. At that point your game needs to acknowledge the one-time product once the player has claimed their Play Games Reward. This should be done using the out of app purchase flow for both single use and repeatable rewards.

  1. Ensure you have integrated with the out of app purchase flow in your game.
  2. When your game starts, or is foregrounded, it should check if the player has any unacknowledged Play Games Rewards. For more information, follow instructions to call queryPurchasesAsync(). Games should endeavour to check and grant rewards as quickly as possible.
  3. Follow the rest of the out of app purchase flow instructions to verify the purchase, grant the entitlement to the user, notify the user and notify Google that the purchase was processed.
  4. Users have up to 3 days to open the game and claim the reward. After 3 days the reward will no longer be available.

Important: If you support multiple in-game identities, you must ensure that your game also prompts the user to decide which in-game identity such reward should be delivered to.

Test Play Games Rewards

For more information on how to test the Play Games Rewards flow, see Google Play Billing Library Testing and troubleshooting guide.