Google Play Games for Windows all on its own

Google Play Games. © Google.

Google will offer a Google Play Games app for Windows next year. This application, developed in-house, will allow games from Google Play to run on Windows laptops, tablets and PCs. It will also give players the ability to resume a game on a PC after playing it on an Android phone or tablet or even a Chromebook. The Google Play Games ecosystem is used by over 2.5 billion users every month and offers some of the best games on the Android platform. Details of the technology that Google uses to emulate Android apps on Windows are not disclosed, but the games will definitely run locally instead of streaming from the cloud. “This will be a native Windows app distributed by Google, which will support Windows 10 and up,” explains Greg Hartrell, Google’s product director of games on Android and Google Play. “It will not involve game streaming.” Google’s application will not be based on Microsoft technology and the company will distribute the application itself.

Google’s announcement comes months after Microsoft introduced a Windows Subsystem for Android, which is capable of running Android apps on PCs. Because the feature was developed in partnership with Amazon, it only gives access to apps from the Amazon App Store.

⇨ The Verge, Tom Warren, “Google is bringing Android games to Windows in 2022.”

2021-12-09