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It doesn't seem to be available in my region yet.

The openness of PC means that a second app store can exist and be successful on the Windows platform. If Google pulls this off, we might see a credible, large store of casual games on Windows for the first time. Right now, mobile shines for casual games and sees the bulk of investment for casual games. It would be a great boon for many casual gamers to be able to switch devices and carry over their games to the PC to play it on a larger screen, possibly with a controller.

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I wouldn’t say “shine”. Mobile games are mostly shitty ad ridden apps with in app purchases of coins and loot boxes targeting “whales”.

Many, if not most, big Triple-A titles on PC, and consoles, are also filled with in game purchases of coins and loot boxes targeting whales. I guess you could say that those are also filled with ads, but at least it is for their own stuff in the game.

The only shining thing in gaming currently are the awesome indie titles that just keep on giving from a single purchase of the game.

> The openness of PC means that a second app store can exist and be successful on the Windows platform

First one being Steam?

> If Google pulls this off, we might see a credible, large store of casual games on Windows for the first time

Steam has tons of casual games too.

Steam has a very hard-core gamer feel to it. Just look at its interface. I do often admire the simplicity of Google Play Store. And I think a dedicated store for casual gamers is both a user experience and discovery issue. Steam solves neither of those because they need to sell "all" kinds of games and with that comes the baggage of years of market choices like DLCs, game "editions" and bundles. Google could just go straight to "Click, Pay and Play".

The Windows Store also has a lot of these games

The last time I bothered trying to make an Android app the SDK's emulator would not run on AMD CPUs and it seemed to have been deliberately crippled. Intel being the most obvious benefactor there.

>> Intel being the most obvious benefactor there.

No need to assume malice when incompetence is sufficient. At a guess, the SDK engineers likely had Intel workstations and didn’t test on other systems. In the course of doing low level optimizations, they may have written some non-portable code.

Only recently did Google start offering an AMD-based workstation, which is highly coveted because it’s incredibly fast for building Android or ChromeOS. Maybe this has been fixed since then from bug reports.

Without going into it too much I don't consider incompetence sufficient in this case.