We at PC Gamer tend to love playing PC games. Many of us are open-minded enough to have fun elsewhere, like on consoles and such, but we still love our PCs. We love our PCs so much that we get excited when we can play non-PC games on them. Every time Sony decides to release something like God of War (opens in a new tab)or Spider-Man (opens in a new tab) on our beloved platform we go crazy with party mods (opens in a new tab).
These huge ultra impressive games (opens in a new tab) Finally coming to PC is always a source of excitement, but what about hundreds of little ones? So far, Google has officially launched its beta version of Google Play Games for PC in Australia, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand. This means that users with Google Play accounts in these regions will be able to check out select Android game titles on their PC.
The application can be downloaded directly from the Google site, (opens in a new tab) and there may even be a prompt for it at the bottom of your home screen when your browser loads. Installing the app gives you access to browse, download and play the mobile games on offer. Currently, Google has over 40 games available on the platform, which is a good start for a beta offering.
Going through the games, there isn’t much that piques my interest, as someone who doesn’t really like mobile games. Potentially more intensive games like Genshin Impact with its huge roster of characters (opens in a new tab) aren’t visible yet, but given that Android still doesn’t have controller support, that’s not too surprising. Instead, the catalog mostly features established mobile titles like Idle Heroes, Cookie Run, and those cursed Garden and Homescapes games.
It’s hard to say if games like these will really benefit from a PC interface, given that they’re very mobile-optimized titles. Still, a mouse and keyboard can often lead to a clear advantage, especially as more and more games come out. Either way, it’s nice to have the ability to play these games on the big screen and not drain your phone’s battery without needing to.
To get the beta version of Google Play Games for PC working, you may also need to quickly access your bios and enable hardware virtualization. Sometimes it’s called other things, like SVM or Secure Virtual Machine on AMD units. This will allow your computer to run Google’s gaming emulations, although that does make us wonder what other Android uses it might have.
After that, everything is quite easy, especially since Google has reduced the minimum requirements to run this new application. It only requires Windows 10, rather than 11, and it’s pretty gentle on the hardware side as well. 8 GB of RAM combined with an Intel UHD Graphics 630 GPU equivalent and a 4-core processor. The only slightly demanding requirement is an SSD with 10GB of free space, we have some suggestions if you’re out (opens in a new tab). Most PCs you have can easily become a Google Play machine with these lightweight requirements.