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Google is hard at work behind the scenes setting up and launching the Play Games for PC beta in Australia, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand. Unfortunately, due to the atmosphere around mobile games in the United States and other regions being less accepting of microtransactions and just the overall cultural acceptance of them, the beta has not yet been rolled out to everyone.
In order to install mobile games on PC, you’ll need the Play Games PC beta installer, and that’s not exactly available outside of the listed regions. However, a friend of mine who lives in California was browsing the Play Store via the web and discovered an “Install on Windows” button there. So far as I’ve seen, this hasn’t really been discussed by Google – the ability to use the main Play Store to grab Windows installers for titles available through the new application.
At this time, it seems to be available to only MiHoYo titles like Genshin Impact and Honkai Impact 3rd, but that could soon change. While it’s possible this is an early glimpse at how installing new content could look for Play Games for PC players, It’s also entirely possible this was a visual bug that wasn’t supposed to be discovered yet.
Regardless, my buddy was still told via the waitlist that he does not yet have access to the Play Games installer for Windows, so grabbing Genshin Impact from the Play Store actually gave him an .exe file and the installation proceeded as normal. From there, he was able to play the PC version of the game – weird.
Because of his location, I believe that Google may be much closer than we had anticipated to releasing this service in the states. I’m optimistically apprehensive about this entire thing, but if the company can add plenty of appealing titles and make sure that they work really well with peripherals like gamepads, mice, and keyboards, I may be sold after all.
Thanks @mrEkli
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