Launched in the United States at the beginning of 2022, the beta of Google’s new service, Google Play Games, will extend to the Asian market. This application allows users to play selected games from the Play Store on Windows 10 and Windows 11 PCs.
Google Play Games allows you to play games from the Play Store on your PC
If Google Play Games should arrive soon in France and will be renamed “Google Play Games” for the occasion, it will be launched in Australia, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Thailand. This service, available in open beta, offers Google Play players who are used to playing on their smartphone the possibility of exporting to the PC in order to enjoy certain games on the platform.
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Previously, in order to play on their computers, Android gamers used third-party apps such as BlueStacks which allows using the Play Store on their computer. The Mountain View company has therefore taken into account this use of its catalog of applications and its games in order to design a tailor-made service for its PC players.
The Google Play Games allows to synchronize the devices of a user (tablet, computer, PC) so that the progress in the games can be preserved. The same Google ID as that of the smartphone or tablet is thus used.
Google takes the opportunity to update its new service
The extension of Google’s service comes with several optimizations to lower the required recommendations for gamers’ PCs. If before it was necessary to have a high-performance PC, this will no longer be the case. For the GPU, an Intel UHD Graphics 630 GPU or any comparable component will be enough to enjoy Google Play Games, whereas it was obliged to have a dedicated gaming GPU before that.
Only four physical CPU cores are now required compared to 8 cores previously, while it will be enough to have at least 10GB of storage to take advantage of the service instead of 20GB. Google Play Games only works on Windows 10 or Windows 11 and requires a minimum of 8GB RAM. Currently, Google claims that around 50 titles are available on the platform like Summoners War, Cookie Run: Kingdom, Last Fortress: Underground and Top War. These games have, all together, several tens of millions of players around the world.
In recent years, the Play Store has been in the sights of several institutions and companies. The latter consider that the Mountain View firm is abusing its dominant position to force publishers to pay heavy taxes or to go through its in-app payment system. Epic Games, Match Group or even Spotify have filed a complaint against Google for these practices. Recently, the European Commission took up the subject and began its investigation.