Two years later and this strange Play Games shortcut on ChromeOS still makes no sense

Two years ago (well, actually a year and a half ago), Google Play Games for PC appeared at the 2021 Game Awards Show, and with it, a mysterious new shortcut appeared on Chromebooks. In addition to the Play Games Android app, a new ChromeOS-centric…launcher accompanied it as a separate icon. What’s strange about it is that it doesn’t appear for everyone (You may need to be a part of the app beta on the Play Store), doesn’t appear all the time for those it does show up for, and when clicked, it reveals a list of your games in a stripped down interface of the actual Play Games app.

Weirder still is that it has a ton of app padding around the main UI elements and all you can do is quickly launch a game using it, sort the games in different orders, and well, nothing more than that. The iconography is just a Play Games controller with a folder around it in place of the “Play” button right-facing triangle.

Anyway, there’s clearly more to this than what meets the eye, and I wonder how much of the Play Games for Windows client will integrate into Chrome OS or how the Android app on Chromebooks will change over time to accommodate gamepads, mice, keyboards, and other peripherals.

– Me, two years ago stupidly hoping for an awesome upgrade for Chromebook gaming

Being that the Play Games app itself is already fairly barebones and accessing your games instantaneously is already pretty straightforward, this extra app makes zero sense. The worst part is that it being created at the same exact time and date of the Play Games for PC announcement, I was led to speculate that it would be a replacement app that better mirrors the desktop PC version of the service, but for Chromebooks and larger screens.

You know, ditch the phone layout in favor of something much cooler and mouse/keyboard friendly? Nope. Instead, it’s just an odd little add in for your Chromebook that you’ve got to look at while Google decides what it wants to do with this half-unfinished project. The bottom of the UI even says “Beta feature”, as seen in the screenshot below.

The tech giant is notorious for running several parallel services and experiments, waiting for one to fail and then dumping all of its efforts into the one that survived, taking two years or more to roll out features and more.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this was an ill-fated attempt to create more dynamic and interactive experiences for Chromebook shelves and launchers and it just never got any feet. It’s obvious that the app itself is half finished and useless, but more than anything, it serves as a depressing reminder that we don’t yet have widgets or anything of the like on Chromebooks all these years later.

Perhaps what took over this initiative was the Phone Hub app mirroring Eche, since you can launch and play games right from there (though not in landscape mode…), but having a native quick launcher for games aside from the simplicity of searching for and clicking a game logo from your app drawer would have been pretty nice.