In 2022, Google launched its own app store for PC compatible Android games: Google Play Games. Since then, the platform has remained in beta.
During this time, some improvements were made, such as a lower barrier to running games. In November last year, the program arrived in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Europe and several other countries. At the Google for Games Developer Summit, the company announced the expansion of Play Games for PC to new regions such as Japan and most of Europe.
The catalog is also being expanded with the arrival of several popular Android games like Angry Birds 2, Garena Free Fire, Ludo King and MapleStory M.
Despite the latest additions, Play Games’ library of PC games isn’t very extensive. For more games, Google has partnered with Intel to allow developers to submit games compiled for phones instead of PCs for Play Games on PC.
The company encourages developers to optimize and compile their PC games with a ndeveloper-focused egg PC game emulator, allowing easier debugging, compiling, and direct sideloading of APKs. Developers can also use Android Studio to tweak graphics and hardware settings to gauge game performance under different configurations.
A new Play Games release checklist will help developers ensure they aren’t missing anything important before submitting their games for approval. This includes using high-resolution textures and assets, support for mouse and keyboard input, and more.
Interested parties can sign up for Google Play Games for PC. It is possible to synchronize game progress and library across all devices with a single Google Account login, i.e. switching between smartphone and desktop.
To download the beta version, the minimum requirements are: operating system from Windows 10 (v2004); SSD with 10 GB of available storage space; IntelR UHD Graphics 630 GPU or comparable; 4 physical CPU cores; 8 GB of RAM. Also, hardware virtualization needs to be enabled.