Google has updated its support page without too much advertising, expanding the Google Play Games service to the European market, including Spain, and with it the possibility of running games on the Android platform on a personal computer with Windows.
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Bringing Android games to personal computers is a work in progress from several vendors. One of them is the Windows subsystem for Android, one of the great novelties announced for Windows 11. It did not arrive in time for the launch, but Microsoft has continued its preferential development due to its “idyll” with Android, once adopted as if it were its own operating system. It was released to the general public last year, and the latest version was updated to Android 13 with improvements and new features.
Once enabled, WSA allows you to install and run Android games and apps as if they were native to Windows. App icons appear in the Start menu, taskbar, and other locations, and apps launch in windows that can be resized or moved. Supports personal computers with ARM and x64 hardware architectures with a minimum of 8 Gbytes of RAM.
Google is also in the works, and the Google Play Games that we will see today was enunciated within the framework of The Game Awards 2021. As far as we know, there is no collaboration between Google and Microsoft. The projects are independent, and to begin with, Google works from Windows 10, something that is not officially possible (but unofficially through third-party tools) in Microsoft’s. In addition, Google’s has a much greater potential than Microsoft’s (for now limited to the Amazon store) since it has the potential to play thousands of titles from the Play Store.
Try Google Play Games
The service has just landed in Europe, although, like the one available for the United States, it still has the ‘beta’ label. The minimum hardware requirements are accessible for any modern PC and are specified in logically, from there on up, Google recommends a dedicated graphics card and a processor with 8 logical cores to improve performance.
- Windows 10 (from version 2004)
- SSD with 10 GB capacity
- 8 GB RAM
- CPU with four physical cores
- Intel UHD 630 GPU or better
- Hardware virtualization enabled
- Windows Administrator Account
Installation
Before installing the service, the previous section of virtualization must be taken into account since the service works with this technology. As such, you need to make sure to activate the Windows hypervisor platform before installation. If you haven’t done it, when you try to run Google Play Games, you will have an error and a warning to go back.
As you may know from other virtualization tutorials that we have been offering you, Hyper-V is the native Windows hypervisor, and although there are alternatives with greater capacity (VirtualBox, VMware Workstation Player…), it stands out for its integration with the system, ease of use, and ability to run directly on the hardware of the host machine without the need to install additional software.
Activation is done from the Control Panel > Programs and Features > Enable or Disable Windows Features. Scroll down the menu and turn on Hyper-V before installing the Google app. (If you still have errors in the execution you should also check that CPU virtualization is enabled in the BIOS/UEFI)
From there, installation is trivial. Google has published a user guide that facilitates the task and basically consists of
- Download the app «Install-GooglePlayGames-Beta.exe” from the official website and install it like any executable.
- Sign in with your Google ID. It has to be the same one you use on your mobile and PC.
- Accept the terms of service and follow the instructions to complete the installation.
Once installed, the application works like another program on Windows. You run the created shortcut, and you’ll enter an interface like the following:
It works like any digital game store. The titles you are interested in must be downloaded to your personal computer. On Android they are tiny compared to those on PC, so you will not have a problem with disk space. Once installed, you will locate them in your library.
Google Play Games is in the beta phase and still has development to improve in performance, controller support, and customization, and also in the number of compatible games that right now are minimal compared to the immensity of those available for Android.
But it’s all about getting started… Running games on the Android platform on a personal computer with Windows is possible, officially from Google and now available in Europe.
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