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Google Play Games Level Up 2026: What Small Unity Studios Should Do

Google Play Games Level Up 2026: What Small Unity Studios Should Do

Google Play's revamped Games Level Up program went live on September 30, 2026, and with it a new fee structure, a long list of quality guidelines and a launch-timing rule that will shape how mobile games ship on Android. A lot of the coverage has focused on the headline 15% fee. For a small Unity studio the more useful question is different: which parts of this actually apply to us now, which apply later, and what should we put on the roadmap this quarter?

What changed on Google Play this year

The changes arrived in three steps.

  1. March 4, 2026. Google announced a new business model that separates the service fee from the fee for using Google Play's billing system, lowers the in-app purchase service fee for new installs to 20%, sets a 10% fee for recurring subscriptions, and introduces two optional programs, the Apps Experience Program and a revamped Games Level Up, with lower rates for participants. The billing fee in the EEA, UK and US is 5%.
  2. June 24, 2026. A follow-up post confirmed that the split fees start on June 30, 2026 in the US, EEA and UK, and that the service fee starts at 10% on a developer's first USD 1M of annual earnings, whether the transaction goes through Google Play billing, alternative billing or an external web link.
  3. September 2026. Enrollment in Level Up opened in Play Console on September 1, and the program rate card took effect on September 30 for approved games.

In parallel, on August 26 Google announced new technical quality requirements for memory use and code optimization that apply to every app and game from February 2027, enrolled or not. That second announcement is the one most small studios should look at first.

The rate card in plain numbers

The official Level Up page publishes the following rates. All of them are service fees; a billing fee is added when you use Google Play billing.

Annual earnings tierSubscriptionsOther transactions, new installsOther transactions, existing installs
First USD 1M10%10%10%
Above USD 1M, standard10%20%25% (20% for external web links)
Above USD 1M, Level Up10%15%20% (15% for external web links)

"New install" means the player's first install or first update from Google Play happened on or after the date the new fees launched in their region; anything earlier counts as an existing install, as defined in the June post.

The program rate card rolls out by player location: Australia, the EEA, Japan, the UK and the US from September 30, 2026; South Korea from December 31, 2026; the rest of the world from September 30, 2027. Vietnam falls into the last group, which matters if a large share of your revenue comes from local players.

The key point for small studios: Level Up changes nothing below USD 1M a year. Every developer already pays 10% on that first million in the rollout markets. The program only lowers the rate on earnings above it.

Who can enroll today

According to the Play Console Help page on enrollment, enrollment is currently open only to developer account groups that have generated at least USD 1M in earnings over the last 12 months, and only admins or account owners can apply. Before applying, the game must be live in production, compliant with Play policies, and reviewers must be given login details to access all functionality.

After September 30, the program rate takes effect within 24 hours of an approved enrollment. If your studio is below the threshold, you cannot enroll yet, and even if you could, the fee benefit would be zero. That is not a reason to ignore the guidelines; it is a reason to treat them as a technical roadmap.

The Level Up guidelines, grouped by effort

The Level Up guidelines are organised under three themes. Here is how they look from the point of view of a Unity team.

Platform features (mostly integration work)

  • Play Games Services v2 must be integrated and initialize at startup. It does not force you to use Google sign-in for your own accounts.
  • Play Games Sidekick, the in-game overlay, can be switched on in Play Console for games published as App Bundles.
  • Achievements: at least 10, each with a unique name and description; Google recommends 40 or more. To be eligible for Quests, at least 4 must be reliably reachable in the first hour.
  • Game Stats: at least 5 repetitive stats (at least one usable for competitive features), plus one progression stat if the game has a primary progression mechanic.
  • Rewards: at least 2 single-use reward offers from September 30, 2026, and at least 1 repeatable offer from March 1, 2027. Paid games are exempt.
  • Cloud save with a conflict-resolution policy. Guest-only games with no cross-session save state are exempt.

Games that primarily target players under 13 are exempt from the whole platform-features group.

Reach across screens (design work)

  • Respect system bar and display cutout insets, and survive rotation, fold/unfold, split-screen and window resizing without losing game state.
  • Landscape games must render full screen at 4:3, 16:10 and 21:9 on the reference devices; portrait games at 3:4, 10:16 and 9:21.
  • Distribution on Google Play Games on PC, either through the emulator or a native PC build.
  • Full playability with controller and keyboard/mouse, including menus. There are exemptions for location-based, sensor-based, rhythm and gyro-aiming games, and drag-and-drop or freehand drawing games only need keyboard and mouse.
  • Distribution on phones, foldables and tablets from September 30, 2026; Android XR, Android TV, Googlebook and Android Auto from September 30, 2027, with exemptions where a form factor would clearly degrade the game.

Stability and performance (engineering work)

  • Crash rate below 1% and ANR rate below 2% on the test devices, and below 2% and 3% on Android devices with 4 GB of RAM or more, measured over a trailing 28 days.
  • Frame rate on reference devices during active gameplay: average at least 55 fps, P90 at least 50 fps, P99 at least 30 fps. Games that do not run at 60 fps on other mobile platforms are exempt, and tablets and foldables are excluded.
  • Vulkan: projects on Unity 2023 or newer (which includes Unity 6) must use Vulkan as the primary graphics API on devices with updated drivers. Games on the Built-in Render Pipeline can opt in to ANGLE on Android 17+ devices and have until September 30, 2027 to move to Vulkan.
  • Memory: once Play's memory thresholds are enforced, games must meet them to keep Level Up status.

Rules that apply even if you never enroll

The August announcement is not tied to Level Up. Starting in February 2027, all apps and games on Play must meet bad-behavior thresholds for three things:

  • Dynamic memory usage (anonymous RSS plus swap), measured across app states and device categories.
  • Bitmap memory, which should not stay resident while the app is in the background or cached.
  • DEX code optimization, with at least 25% coverage across optimization, shrinking and obfuscation, using R8 or a similar tool.

Google says apps that miss these thresholds may see reduced visibility and publishing capabilities, and the exact numbers are in the Play Console technical quality requirements. New memory charts and an out-of-memory crash filter are already in Android vitals, so you can check where your game stands today.

This is where Unity games are exposed. Google's own Unity memory guide explains that once Unity's native allocators and managed heap grow to cover a peak, the engine keeps those pages instead of returning them to the OS. A single loading spike can therefore inflate your resident memory for the rest of the session. On Android 17, the new Memory Limiter can terminate a process that exceeds its budget, which makes peak memory the number to watch.

A Unity checklist for the next 90 days

Whether or not you are close to USD 1M, these steps improve the game on low-end devices and prepare you for February 2027:

  1. Open Android vitals and look at the new memory metrics by RAM bucket. Note the P90 values for your heaviest scenes.
  2. Profile the peaks, not the averages. Use the Unity Memory Profiler on a 4 GB device during scene loads and level transitions.
  3. Split large AssetBundles or Addressables groups. Loading one asset loads the whole bundle, and a bundle cannot be unloaded while any asset in it is in use.
  4. Fix texture settings: ASTC compression for Android, Read/Write disabled unless a script needs pixel access, and no mipmaps on UI textures (the guide estimates about 33% savings on those textures).
  5. Set audio load types by use: streaming for music, compressed in memory for long effects, decompress on load only for short, frequent effects.
  6. Strip shader variants. Unity loads compiled variants in chunks of 4 MB by default, so unused variants still cost native memory.
  7. Cut per-frame GC allocations: lambdas that capture locals, LINQ in Update, foreach over interfaces, uncached WaitForSeconds.
  8. Enable minification for the Android build and check the DEX optimization insights Play Console now shows for each uploaded bundle.
  9. Switch to Vulkan as the first graphics API if you are on Unity 2023 or later, and test on your oldest supported devices before shipping.
  10. Test resizing: rotate, split the screen and run on a tablet; safe areas and UI anchors usually break first.

The launch-timing rule

One guideline deserves its own section. From September 30, 2026, a game is only eligible for the program rate card if it releases on Android form factors at the same time as on any comparable non-Android form factor. If it launches elsewhere first, it waits six months after its Android launch before the reduced rate applies. There is a 15-day grace period for review delays and soft launches (30 days in exceptional cases), and the rule does not apply in the EEA. Games already released elsewhere before September 30, 2026 are not subject to the waiting period.

Google does not name specific platforms, but for a studio that usually ships on iOS first, the safe reading is that an iPhone launch counts as comparable. If you expect a title to cross USD 1M, plan a same-week Android release from the start rather than a port months later.

Pros and cons for small studios

  • Pro: most guidelines (stable frame rate, low crash rate, sane memory use, tablet support) make the game better for players anyway.
  • Pro: Quests and Game Stats can add visibility on Google's surfaces.
  • Con: controller, keyboard/mouse and PC support are real work for touch-first casual games.
  • Con: below USD 1M there is no fee benefit at all.

Our take

At Lightning Studio we build Unity games for phones, mostly for English-speaking markets. For a team our size, Level Up is not a reason to rebuild a game this quarter. The February 2027 memory and code optimization thresholds are, because they affect visibility for every game on Play. Our plan is to treat the Level Up guidelines as a quality checklist: Vulkan and memory budgets first, then safe areas and tablet layouts, then Play Games Services features on titles that show long-term retention. If a game starts trending toward USD 1M a year, the same-day launch rule becomes a business decision, so we are building release plans that ship iOS and Android together.

Sources

Want to see how we apply this in our own titles? Browse the games we have shipped at Lightning Games.

Cover photo: Playing with smartphone by Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).

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