It’s official, Google has announced its game center, the Google Play Games services, but it comes with a price: Google is killing  off Google+ Games on June 30, 2013.

Anyone who enjoys playing games on Google+ should contact the game developers to find out if there are any other places they can get their beloved games, especially if you still have game credits or if you purchased items in the game.  Some games already have links for alternative sites.

So what is Google Play Games?

According to Google’s page, it is “a cross-platform game service and SDK on Android, iOS, and the web, enabling a rich set of in-game user experiences for cross screen gaming,” that has “Achievements: record and celebrate your greatest gaming accomplishments; Social & Public Leaderboards: Google+ powered leaderboards report your in-game scores between friends and across the world; Cloud save: games automatically store your game saves, progress and preferences for Android, iOS, and web, and Real-time multi-player: connect up to 4 players simultaneously for cooperative and competitive game play on Android.”

Rumors regarding the service were abundant before Google I/O and evidence showed sources were right.

Joining Kristin Feledy on this morning’s Live NewsDesk Show is NewsDesk Director of Production Mark Zamora with his Breaking Analysis on this new Google service, and what it means for developers.

“I think if you’re developing games for mobile, like mobile platforms, you should definitely take advantage of Google Play games services,” Zamore stated.  “The APIs are free, there’s no certification process, no ridiculousness that you have to go through.  Like Google said, ‘We want to make our services available to as many folks as possible,’ and that’s exactly what they’re doing.

“As a game developer, you wanna be fishing in the biggest pond you can, and Google Play games services allow people to do just that.  So hands down, if you’re developing for mobile platform, use this service because it’s the exact same as Game Center except you have a much larger audience to pool from.”

For more of Zamora’s Breaking Analysis on Google Play Games services, check out the NewsDesk video below: