Google Details New Tools to Make Google Play Games Multiplatform

Google kicked off its Google for Games Developer Summit today, where the company announced new tools to help Android game developers bring their games to more screens. While Microsoft has teamed up with Amazon to bring Android apps to Windows 11, Google has started rolling out the Google Play Games for PC Beta in select markets in January.

Currently, the Google Play Games for PC Beta is only available in South Korea, Taiwan, and Honk Kong, and it works as a standalone app providing access to a catalog of “high quality” Android games from the Play Store. Google has already seen Android app usage experiencing a 50% year-over-year increase on Chromebooks, and the company says that most of this growth has been coming from games.

If Google Play Games for PC will allow developers to make their Android games available on over 1 billion Windows PCs, Google also wants to make it easier for game developers to create Android games on Windows. That’s exactly the purpose of the new Android Game Development Extension for Visual Studio.

“Android Game Development Extension allows game developers to build directly for Android from within Visual Studio. To make debugging easier across Java and C, AGDE will now include cross compatibility between Android Studio and Visual Studio so you can open and edit your AGDE projects in Android Studio’s debugger,” the company explained.

Lastly, Google has announced a new Play Partner Program for Games that will offer top game developers access to additional growth tools and services, including faster releases with a priority publishing queue. You can learn more about Google’s latest games solutions for developers on this page.