Android Games on PC

Oh boy, millions of ad-ridden, pay-to-win, copy-pasted virtual casinos, right from the convenience of my PC. Gotta get me one of those beta invites!

You can already do this on PC using the Windows Subsystem for Android. The major issue surrounding WSA was that it was too technical to setup for most PC users so we built an app for our non-technical users to solve this. Right now, Google building a standalone app for only Android games (people use Android apps fairly on par with games on PC) and then insisting on a slow rollout will most likely make the product go nowhere.<p>Calling this now. This is a likely candidate for the Google graveyard.

I gave this a quick try, and my first impression is that they&#x27;ve whitelisted games above a certain popularity or monetization level.<p>On my phone, Google Play library shows about 50 games that I&#x27;ve ever installed which are compatible on my phone and available to reinstall. On the PC, the library is showing exactly one available game.<p>They have 15 game categories and maybe average 10 games per category. Most of these are ones I&#x27;ve seen advertised, am not seeing anything that looks low budget.<p>Maybe the next update of Android Studio will let you pick &quot;PC&quot; as a supported platform. There&#x27;s no &quot;.apk&quot; in my Windows file associations, so maybe no way to sideload things?

Quite off topic, but some PC games are now on Android. See for example Space Cadet: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fexed&#x2F;Pinball-on-Android&#x2F;releases">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fexed&#x2F;Pinball-on-Android&#x2F;releases</a><p>Once you get to enjoy a proper straightforward PC game on your phone, most every other ad-filled Android game feels insulting.

Slightly off topic, from the FAQs, this is hilarious:<p>&gt; How is this different from the Google Play Games mobile app? The Google Play Games mobile app is primarily focused on the instant games experience where you can jump right into casual games. We’ll have more announcements for the mobile app in the near future. Going forward, “Google Play Games” will refer to the PC experience where you can enjoy your favorite Android games.<p>I wonder if Meta&#x2F;Apple execs ever secretly thank Google for being so disorganized and make it easy to compete.

On the surface level this seems good. The current Android-on-PC landscape is pretty bleak; your choices boil down to spyware&#x2F;adware emulators (Mumu, Bluestacks, LDPlayer etc) or Windows Subsystem for Android, which forced me to either use the Amazon Appstore or sideload through the terminal last I tried it.<p>Looks like my account isn&#x27;t eligible for the beta yet, presumably it&#x27;s a slow rollout.

Waydroid allows one to run Android apps on a standard GNU&#x2F;Linux distro. Install f-droid on it and be happy. Of course, you won&#x27;t get google play games but neither will you get ads.<p>But I can see what google is doing here: release for Android, get the &quot;pc market&quot; for free. In the end it may boost competition on PC, incentivize more multi-platform games and may increase android share among gamers.

There are way more good games for PC than Android, and a lot of Android games are ad-filled garbage. Any bets on when Google kills this product?

Like how Google disrespects Linux users with Google Drive, now they introduce Android games on Google Play (Android based on Linux) that only run on Windows 10 or later. Sometimes Google sucks. It&#x27;s OK though, Android games suck too.

Are there any valid android games that&#x27;s also good to play on android and on PC?<p>I think of vampire survivor but it also has PC version.

Presumably to counter this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;learn.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;windows&#x2F;android&#x2F;wsa&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;learn.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;windows&#x2F;android&#x2F;wsa&#x2F;</a>

Windows only:<p>Minimum PC specifications Your PC will need to meet these requirements to play. • OS: Windows 10 (v2004) • Storage: Solid state drive (SSD) with 10 GB of available storage space • Graphics: Intel® UHD Graphics 630 GPU or comparable • Processor: 4 CPU physical cores (some games require an Intel CPU) • Memory: 8 GB of RAM • Windows admin account • Hardware virtualization must be turned on

&gt;Minimum requirements<p>&gt;OS: Windows 10 (v2004)<p>One day I&#x27;ll figure out how to get Waydroid working, but I wish stuff like this worked on Linux more easily.

It doesn&#x27;t seem to be available in my region yet.<p>The openness of PC means that a second app store can exist and be successful on the Windows platform. If Google pulls this off, we might see a credible, large store of casual games on Windows for the first time. Right now, mobile shines for casual games and sees the bulk of investment for casual games. It would be a great boon for many casual gamers to be able to switch devices and carry over their games to the PC to play it on a larger screen, possibly with a controller.

Only on Windows so far, bummer.

Tried this but wasn&#x27;t impressed. LDPlayer has much better performance still + sideloading apk is trivial <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ldplayer.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ldplayer.net&#x2F;</a><p>Used Bluestacks before that which was also okay <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bluestacks.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bluestacks.com&#x2F;</a>

Open the start menu on a consumer version of Windows today and you mY think this already happened: Candy crush, Bejeweled, Netflix…

Too bad it was Windows only. I&#x27;m thinking playing Genshin on my Linux Laptop instead of my potato phone

&quot;Not available in your region&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s an Android emulator. It runs locally. It uses Google Play which already works worldwide. So why the heck does it ever need to be made aware that the world is divided up into countries?!

At first I thought this was pretty stupid since mobile games suck...<p>But I remembered I give my kids educational games on the phone, and this could be useful.<p>Anyway, if anyone wants to drop some Kids games that are educational, I&#x27;m all ears.

Aren’t these games already free with IAP? Did I miss an actual paid game?<p>Also this makes more sense for Mac , or even Linux (even though proton is changing things), where there is a dearth of games. Windows has plenty of high quality games courtesy of Steam, GOG, and Epic to name a few platforms

System Requirements: Hardware virtualization must be turned on.<p>Now that is one ODD of a system requirement.

You could of course already do that, and I vaguely remember with I think Fortnight where some would play on the PC with keyboard and mouse against players with the touch interface, of course dominating every match.

Is there a way to jailbreak this to run arbitrary apps?

If Windows can run Android apps, they can bring back Windows Phone. The only issue with that platform is nobody made apps for it.

It would be nice indeed if I can eventually play FGO on a Windows machine, saves me the trouble of keeping a tablet around for it.

Apple Arcade is superior, no ads, no in-app purchases at least for families with young kids

What’s the over under on how many months from now this will get the axe?

Unfortunately you can&#x27;t access the service without an account.

Wonder how will the touch to keyboard mapping will work

I feel like the Android (and iOS) gaming market is filled with the kind of game that give you early successes followed by soulcrushing wait times bypassed through paywalls that can soak up infinite amounts of cash and therefore I have not given any of it a fair shot. This is the actual reason I always thought a &quot;gaming phone&quot; with a price tag rivaling a decent computer was very silly. Is that just me? Is there anything original worth playing, maybe even games you just buy outright?

very limited games...

The question is will it last longer than stadia.

No.

why

Some PM and VP probably looked for ways to increase the P&amp;L. I&#x27;ve talked with many googlers, and they interviewed me for leadership positions related to gaming before. I do not like their approach. No gamer wants this. I&#x27;m not even sure gaming on Android is even close to what it should be on mobile.<p>PC gamers, the ones who buy ssds, gaming gpus, want 4k 60fps, you&#x27;re telling me they want to use mobile games in a vm or wrapper or whatever? You&#x27;re telling me the people who buy $70 games want free 5 minute games?<p>There is no way one of these execs is a serious gamer, like the ones they&#x27;re courting. This is lazy, cheap, and ignorant. I think Stadia was more meaningful than this even, because at least it had some games. This is just going to be a massive waste of time, and they&#x27;ll just conclude that gaming is a tough business and they were too early.