Google’s been plotting to expand into the Windows ecosystem for awhile now, and we’re seeing a glimpse of it happen now. They’ve launched their new Google Play Games app for Windows, which will let you play the most popular Android games such as Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, State of Survival, Summoners War and Asphalt 9 on your computer rather than your smartphone or tablet.
This isn’t just a simply port of the mobile Google Play Games app that you’re probably familiar with on your smartphone either. While the mobile app is focused on the ‘instant games experience’ where you can jump into a casual game on your device easily, this new Google Play Games is targeted at letting users enjoy their favourite Android games even from a computer. The PC app lets you browse, download and play a select number of mobile games on a PC and not only will you be able to use keyboard and mouse for it, Google Play Games will also sync your progress across your devices and also has integration with Google Play Points.
Unfortunately, it’s currently limited to users in Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan for now. This is because Google Play Games for Windows is still in beta, and only anyone in these regions will be able to sign up to access the beta. Google will be extending invitations on a rolling basis, and does say that they’ll be expanding to other regions in 2022 and beyond. You’ll also need to ensure that you meet its hardware requirements, which includes a PC with Windows 10 and newer, 8GB of RAM, 20GB of storage, a discrete graphics card capable of gaming, hardware virtualisation turned on and a Windows admin account. You can click here to see the full PC requirements for Google Play Games. Google adds that it’s not yet available for Mac users right now.
Of course, if you can’t wait for Google to expand their Google Play Games beta to cover Malaysia, there’s still other ways to play Android games on Windows PCs right now. The first is the tried and true method of using an Android emulator such as Bluestacks to use a virtual Android system on your computer. That’ll work with Windows 7 and above, but for Windows 11 users, native Android support is already available. The caveat is that you’ll need to use the Amazon Appstore rather than the Google Play Store.
If you’d like to check out the Google Play Games beta right now, or maybe sign up for it if you live in Hong Kong, South Korea or Taiwan, you can head over to the Google Play Games website now. Even if you don’t live in one of those regions, you can still sign up to be notified for when the beta does come to Malaysia.
