Google Just Made Four Big Upgrades to Android Gaming on Your Windows PC

Google just announced some notable upgrades to the Google Play gaming experience on Windows PCs, with improvements that cover game discovery and purchases, and the news that a broader number of paid titles are now becoming available for the desktop.

While an official Windows client for Google Play apps and games has been available for several years, these latest updates mean the experience is more polished than ever before.

There are four main changes for gamers wanting to play Android games on Windows.

• First, Google is "actively expanding" the number of paid, premium games that are fully optimized for PCs. Android games don't get this optimization by default, and need to be specifically tweaked to support PC gaming (keyboard controls and all), so more titles that meet this criteria will be very welcome.

• Second, there's a new PC section in the Play Store Games tab on mobile devices, so you can actually see which titles are going to be cross-platform compatible before you install them.

• Third, you only need to buy a game once to use it on both mobile and desktop (something that wasn't always the case in the past).

• The last upgrade is Game Trials. On selected titles, you'll be able to dive in and start playing for free—once you reach a certain limit in terms of time or progress, you'll then be asked if you want to buy the game (and your progress will be carried over, if you do decide to make the purchase).

It's not clear from the announcements how long this will all take to roll out, but Google says games such as Moonlight Peaks, Sledding Game, and Low-Budget Repairs will be available on PC in the "coming months." None of those games are live in the Play Store app on Android yet.

There's a lot to like about running Android games on the desktop—not least a much bigger screen, and keyboard and mouse input options—so if you're keen to dive in, here's how you can give it a try.

How to Android games on your PC

Get started by visiting the Google Play Games web portal on your Windows PC. Follow the download prompts, and you get taken through the process of installing the software and entering your Google account details (for syncing purposes). Assuming you have actually played a game on your Android device at some point, your profile and stats are carried over to the desktop.

At the end of the installation process, you'll be shown a list of games you've already played that are available on Windows. You can also find this list later by clicking From your library on the home page of the Google Play Games app. The majority of the titles I've played on Android seem to be present and correct.

The playing experience is, on the whole, intuitive and straightforward. Most of the games I tried I had no problems with, although sometimes the desktop controls can take some working out: Click the keyboard icon to the left of the game window to remap these (you might also find some control settings within the games themselves).

You can also click the visual settings button (the sliders icon) to change how the game is displayed on screen, and there's a volume control button on the left too. Games tend to stick to their default orientation from mobile, whether that's landscape or portrait, but you can adjust the size of the gaming window.

The games I tried from my own library were rather hit and miss when it came to syncing up—some carried my progress over from my phone and some didn't, so it seems likely that the onus is largely on developers to implement this right now (and it's something Google clearly wants to improve).

From the home page, click the magnifying glass icon to explore games from the desktop: You can filter out titles that haven't been optimized for PC, and from what I can see, there's already plenty to choose from. I didn't find any Game Trials available at the time of writing, so it seems those are still in the pipeline.

Android games on PC can be a lot of fun—especially those that work properly with keyboards or gamepads—and I can see this being something a lot of gamers should set up, especially given the latest improvements. And when you're not sitting at your Windows PC, you can carry on gaming as normal on your phone or tablet.