Google’s still struggling to crack PC gaming

Do PC gamers long to play mobile games…on the PC? Google continues to think so, and the company is making incremental moves to improve its Google Play platform on the PC.

Google is adding a Steam-like trial period of one hour, called Game Trials, while adding more paid games. An AI-like assistant called Sidekick is also being turned on for some of those games; if you’re still stumped, you can talk about the game and trade hints with community posts.

Google Play arrived on the PC in 2022, and the premise hasn’t really changed: If you’d like to play mobile games on your PC with a mouse and keyboard, Google Play for the PC is the way to go. To date, most of those have been free, ad-supported games, with no need for a trial. Google’s trying to change that.

Aurash Mahbod, the Google vice president and general manager in charge of Games on Google Play, said that about 2 billion players a month play Google Play games…though the company wouldn’t disclose how many of those are on the PC. (Google has over 200,000 games on Google Play Games available on mobile and PC, a company representative said.)

But the company is trying to lure indie games like Dredge, with both mobile and PC ports of the game. If the developer so chooses, they can enable the one-hour trial or also allow gamers to buy both the PC and mobile version of the game at the same time. (Incidentally, cross-platform purchases and progression is also a key feature of Microsoft’s next-generation console, code-named Project Helix.)

To help gamers find those games, Google is adding a PC-specific tab on its online storefront. (Playing a game on the PC requires the user to download the Android-esque environment in which the game runs.) Players can wishlist games that they want, too.

What Google does not offer, yet, are the sort of AAA titles PC gamers are used to playing. Google also does not offer a subscription service a la Xbox Game Pass, or lures like the free games offered by the Epic Games Store. Mahbod had no comment when asked if Google would follow suit.

All this means that Google, for all of its market clout in the mobile space, is on the outside looking in when it comes to PC gaming. But Google has money, smarts, and market power. The question is whether Google management will see it as another Stadia — a cloud gaming service Google hyped, then discarded — or as a platform like Chromebooks optimized for cloud gaming, which it still supports as part of the Chromebook Plus program. Will that change as Google merges Android and Chrome OS? Mahbod didn’t say.

Frankly, Google doesn’t look like it will be a contender in the PC gaming space. On the other hand, Google Play for PC supplies the mobile gaming apps we all thought would arrive with Microsoft’s Android-in-Windows experiment. That doesn’t look like it will change anytime soon.