Back in December, Google confirmed that it was working in an official way to play Android games on Windows PCs. We saw a limited beta test program for the new Google Play Games desktop app drop in January, and a more public PC beta began rolling out in Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong last month. Now it looks like Google is preparing Android desktop images so developers can configure them in Android Studio, probably in anticipation of developers making games for Google Play Games on Windows.
As seen by magnapauloursus on Twitter, Google has added an “Android Desktop System Images” layer to the list of SDK updates in Android Studio. The link reflected in Android Studio is not yet available and gives a 404 error, but it clearly indicates that Google wants to introduce desktop images to developers. The probable reason for this is that developers can test that their apps and games work on desktop machines. We pulled the file that Android Studio downloads from Google’s servers and it says the file was generated on April 18th.
All this, of course, tells us that this is a recent development. If this file was just uploaded, it may mean that Google intends to distribute Android Desktop system images in a matter of hours. If it’s been uploaded for a few days (which it could have been), it’s suggesting that Google’s preparing for a launch – though we may be a little off yet.
In terms of what to expect, Google’s primary executable for Google Play Games on Windows is reportedly “crosvm.exe”, indicating that it is based on Google’s official virtual machine for Chrome OS. Google has previously released the minimum system requirements for Play Games for PC, which include Windows 10 v2004 or later, an SSD, 20 GB of free storage, a “gaming-class GPU”, 8 logical GPU cores, 8 GB of RAM, a Windows administrator account, and hardware virtualization (hypervisor / HAXM) enabled. Google says that AMD PCs with less than 1 GB of VRAM and Lenovo ThinkPad laptops are not compatible. Currently, PCs with Windows 11 can also use the new Windows subsystem for Android to run Android applications and games, and you can even sideload the Google Play Store.
If Google is not going to announce that these Android Desktop images will be available to developers soon, then it may be a message that will be saved to Google I / O. Given the currently limited beta launch of the platform, as more developers gain access to it, they will need to be able to test that their apps and games actually work in Google Play Games on the virtual Windows -machine.
Source: @magnapauloursus
Via: @MishaalRahman