Google’s Android Gaming Software Comes to More PCs Through an Official Hack

The Google Play Games logo.

Google is doing its best to help PC gamers with lower-power systems access Play Games. The company released a workaround that shows users how to disable Play Games’ compatibility check. However, the company stresses that it “can’t guarantee how well games run, or if games run at all, on some PCs.”

If you have a PC that falls below Play Games’ current minimum requirements but want to get in on the open beta, run through the following steps:

  1. In the Windows search box, enter environment variables.
  2. Click this panel: “edit environment variables for your account”
  3. Under user variables, click “New…”.
  4. Set Variable name to “GOOGLE_PLAY_GAMES_SUPPRESS_COMPATIBILITY_CHECK”
  5. Set Variable value to “true”
  6. Click OK and close all screens.
  7. If Google Play Games is running in your system tray, exit it from the tray icon and restart it. If not, continue by clicking Google Play Games in the Start menu.

Right now, the minimum specifications to run Google Play Games include Windows 10 operating system, 10GB free storage space, 8GB RAM, 630 GPU (or comparable), four CPU physical cores, and hardware visualization enabled. However, Google recommends having eight logical cores for better gameplay performance rather than just four CPU cores.

Source: 9to5Google