Google Play Games for PC now available in beta, bringing your favorite Andr

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Google Play Games for PC now available in beta, bringing your favorite Android games to Windows



Google surprised everyone in December when the company confirmed it was working on an official way to play Android games on Windows PCs. The limited beta testing program for the new Google Play Games desktop application opened in January, and now the company is ready for players to take it for a spin.

Google announced on Tuesday that it has started rolling out the Google Play Games for PC Beta in South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Just as previously announced, it’s a standalone Windows PC application built by Google, designed for downloading and playing Android games from the Play Store. More details will apparently be revealed during the ongoing ‘Google for Games Developer Summit’, but there are already videos and images of the application in action from players in South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.



Only a handful of games are accessible right now, with no option to search for others — Google presumably wants to make sure the desktop application works with a smaller selection first. Also, there’s no option to download applications that aren’t games. The main executable is reportedly called “crosvm.exe,” seemingly indicating it’s based on Google’s official virtual machine for Chrome OS.

Google previously published the minimum system requirements for Play Games for PC, which includes Windows 10 v2004 or later, an SSD, 20GB of available storage space, a “gaming-class GPU” (here are all the supported options), 8 logical GPU cores, 8GB RAM, a Windows admin account, and hardware virtualization (hypervisor/HAXM) enabled. Google says that AMD PCs with less than 1GB VRAM and Lenovo ThinkPad laptops are not compatible.



It’s not clear yet when Google will bring the application to the rest of the world. PCs with Windows 11 can also use the new Windows Subsystem for Android to run Android applications and games, and with the help of third-party scripts, the Google Play Store can be sideloaded. There are also other Android emulators built for games that have been around for years, such as Bluestacks.


The post Google Play Games for PC now available in beta, bringing your favorite Android games to Windows appeared first on xda-developers.



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