Google Play Games for PC, the web giant’s service for bringing mobile games onto PC, will be expanding in the coming months.
Announced as part of a keynote at the Google for Games Developer Summit, 2023, the expansion of the service, currently available in 13 countries, will see it come to Japan and Europe. The service will also be adding a number of new, high-profile titles to its existing catalogue. Google Play Games for PC will be adding Garena Free Fire, Ludo King, Maple Story M and more to the service as they also loosen restrictions on game optimisation when submitting titles for the platform.
Thanks to a partnership with Intel, developers will also no longer have to optimise their builds for a x86 format before submitting. Further streamlining the submission process for dev teams, as they did with the developer emulator, the easy checking and tweaking of builds before they go live on the platform.
Single screen space
The expansion of Google Play Games is an indicator of the importance of cross-platform play in Google’s digital ecosystem. The idea of forming a single-screen singularity, or allowing users to play seamlessly across multiple platforms is something mainly seen in subscription services, but Google seems eager to make it feasible as a simple and streamlined process in the same ecosystem.
The support not just for larger developers but also for smaller dev teams mirrors the efforts of other “mobile on PC” companies such as pley (formerly Trail) to streamline the onboarding process.
Google Play Games for PC may be coming into competition with those attempting to capitalise on the slowly growing desire to bring mobile games to multiple platforms. And with the greater resources available to Google we may soon see a strong competition developing for whether a third or first-party ecosystem can attract more developers.
