Google’s solution for playing Android games on Windows computers, Google Play Games for PC, entered public beta last year in five countries. Today, the beta is expanding to even more regions and computers, and there are a few new features to enjoy.
Google Play Games is a virtual Android environment with support for downloading and playing select games from the Google Play Store. That gives it some overlap with Microsoft’s own Windows Subsystem for Android, as well as third-party virtualization tools like Bluestacks. However, the Windows Subsystem for Android only works on Windows 11, and only with apps and games available through the Amazon Appstore. Google’s application works on both Windows 10 and 11, but is only designed for games, and it still doesn’t have all the games found on Android phones and tablets — many of them were not designed with mice and non-touch screens in mind.
Google claims it has “hundreds of games” in the PC app, including Cookie Run: Kingdom, Eversoul, Summoners War, Homescapes, Evony: The King’s Return, Call of Dragons, and Arknights. Today’s announcement also points out the availability of Free Fire MAX, which you may not have heard about (and sounds like an Amazon tablet) but is currently the eighth-highest top grossing action game on the store with over 100 million installations. Google Play Games for PC is also now available in more than 120 regions, as more countries in Asia, Europe, and Latin America were added in the past few weeks. The United States is included in that list.
The Google Play Games app should also be available on more PCs, but Google wasn’t specific about what is actually changing there. The company’s blog post explained, “To make Google Play Games available to as many players as possible, we’ve opened up access to the beta to more PCs. With this update, hundreds of millions of additional PC users can now give it a try.” That sounds like Google is talking about the system requirements, but those have not changed for at least several months — you still need Windows 10, at least 10GB of storage, 8GB RAM, 4 physical CPU cores, and ideally a gaming-class GPU.
Google is also adding support for keyboard remapping, so you can change which keys you want to use as controls. Some games already had this functionality in their settings, but for the ones that don’t, the Play Games app can handle them for you.
You can download the Google Play Games app for your PC from the official website.
Source: Google
