As announced in December, Google is bringing Android games to Windows. The project is simply called “Google Play Games”and the Windows version is now open for beta registration. The catch is that Google Play Games is getting very limited distribution: you need to be in Korea, Taiwan, or Hong Kong to register.
Google says that if you manage to get into the beta, you will be able to “play Google Play’s catalog of games on… Windows PCs through a standalone app made by Google.”The company says, “We’re excited to announce that some of the world’s most popular mobile games will be available at launch, including Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, Summoners War, State of Survival: The Joker Collaboration, and Three Kingdoms Tactics.”who use the Google Play Games cloud to store achievements and progress will be able to sync their progress across PC and mobile devices (and, of course, Chrome OS).
As for why this is happening, it’s likely a response to Microsoft’s plan to bring Android apps to Windows 11. Microsoft teamed up with Amazon to bring the Amazon App Store catalog to Windows, and now Google is also bringing its Android games catalog. These are only games and not any other type of application. Games scale more easily on larger screens, but I can still think of some common apps that might be useful on a PC.
The Google blog post doesn’t talk about how Google Play Games works yet. Android emulation, something based on the Microsoft Windows Subsystem for Linux, or streaming? Google is launching beta registration pages and a developer site that we hope will have more information.