Whoever said PC gaming is dead is probably eating their words right about now. Google Play Games for PC has entered open beta in five markets: South Korea, Honk Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, and Australia. This, along with Sony’s recent addition of the “PlayStation Games for PC” webpage on the official PlayStation site, just goes to show that while the PC gaming landscape may be changing, it isn’t going away as some are predicting.
While it is true that PC gaming’s market share has been steadily slipping in recent years, this is representative of an evolving gaming market, as the popularity of mobile gaming continues to surge with more and more people playing games on their mobile phones.
Though the PC came in last in 2021 as the gaming platform of choice, behind mobile and console gaming according to the Statista data above-linked, PC gaming still raked in a tidy $36.7 billion in the U.S. alone in a bad year.
Next level unlocked! Google Play Games beta is now available for download for all players in Australia, Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand 💻 Start exploring and playing mobile games on PC https://t.co/7V7pTh1DFr pic.twitter.com/g0J3aev3zR
— Google Play (@GooglePlay) August 24, 2022
And that is why you won’t see game makers abandoning the PC as a viable gaming platform any time soon. Hence the Google Play Games for PC open beta announcement. Google Play Games for PC is pretty much just what is sounds like: a program that allows Windows users to play Android games on their computers. The newly-updated minimum specs for the app are as follows:
- Windows 10 version 2004 or newer
- Quad-core CPU
- Intel UHD Graphics 630 GPU or comparable
- 8GB RAM
- 10GB SSD storage
The app supports over 50 games currently, according to a Google blog post,
In the last few months, we have more than doubled our Google Play Games catalog to 50+ titles, which can be played on Windows PCs via a standalone application built by Google. Our catalog includes many of the most popular mobile games in the world including Summoners War, Cookie Run: Kingdom, Last Fortress: Underground, and Top War. Together, these games are played by hundreds of millions of players globally
The Google Play Games for PC beta will come to other regions later this year, though no further details have been given at this time.
Featured image courtesy of 9to5google.com.
