By Nelson Schneider - 03/23/25 at 02:07 PM CT
The last time I took a look at the state of mobile gaming, it was in those halcyon days of 2019, before the COVID pandemic made the entire world a duller, gloomier place to live. Back then, Apple and Google were trying to tame the monster they unleashed upon the world with a muzzle shaped like perpetual subscriptions. Unsurprisingly, very little has changed within the mobile gaming ecosystem, and ad-infested microtransaction engines providing the absolute bare minimum of interest and functionality have continued to clog the app stores, making it next to impossible to find anything legitimately good to play on a mobile device that isn’t already a straight-up port of a PC/console game.
For a while, though, it seemed that Microsoft was going to flex its muscle as the still-dominant OS manufacturer, by creating a way to access Android apps – through the Amazon storefront, NOT Google Play – on Windows 11 devices. To me, it seemed that Microsoft was hoping for two things to happen: First, that the availability of widely popular mobile apps on Windows would make Microsoft’s OS more appealing to people whose primary computing experience was Android, and who were already locked into mobile ecosystems for their workflows. Secondarily, Microsoft may have been hoping that the presence of profitable mobile games on Windows via an emulation layer would eventually lead to native ports of more and more Android apps to the Windows Store, which would surreptitiously bolster the Xbox Gaming ecosystem by allowing Microsoft to tap into the infinite amounts of money mobile apps seem uniquely situated to extract from idiots.
The result of Microsoft’s desire to blend the Android ecosystem with the Windows ecosystem was the Windows Subsystem for Android, which followed in the footsteps of the Windows Subsystem for Linux – the latter being an attempt at placating system administrators and hardcore code jockeys by giving Windows the ability to act like Linux and Windows simultaneously. While the Linux Subsystem has proven to be popular, and was even backported as a feature to Windows 10, the Android Subsystem stagnated and had official support cut off as of the 5th of this month. Apparently, Microsoft just couldn’t find a way to siphon money out of the infinite torrent of microtransaction cash flowing into Android, possibly because Google offered zero help, but more likely because the entire idea was stupid in the first place.
There have been numerous Android emulators developed over the years since the OS first launched. The first of these was BlueStacks, which started as a bare-bones program with a ton of overhead and performance issues that did, indeed, allow users to install and use Android Apps on Windows. Unfortunately, the absolute greed and obsessive monetization that infests mobile ecosystems couldn’t be contained, and infected the very emulators themselves. There are several competing Android emulators on the market at the present, including BlueStacks, Nox, and GameLoop, and, in a grotesque parody of both emulation and Android itself, are completely covered in ads from top to bottom, with video ads regularly playing on a blank desktop for no reason.
The absolute state of Android emulation on Windows has gotten so bad that Google has finally decided to step-in with their recent public Beta test of Google Play Games for PC/Mac/Linux. It’s an outright condemnation of your entire ecosystem when NOBODY can, or even wants to tame it and transform it into something actually useful. I’m not holding my breath that Google Play Games for PC will actually do anything to change the status quo, as there are desperately few Android games worth playing, and I can’t imagine the audience for legitimate gaming experiences would buy the Android version of something like “Stardew Valley” and emulate it on PC instead of just buying the native PC version.
The ultimate issue with legitimizing Android (and iOS) games, and why it seems to be such a Sisyphean task, is that none of the players involved want to address the core issues. These mobile games are really just piles of ads designed to lure in stupid, young, or elderly people with false impressions, then provide a bland experience that might pull some microtransaction fees, all while Google (or Apple) as both the platform holder AND the advertiser skims revenue from ads for crappy mobile games being run in other crappy mobile games, in an infinite loop that may-or-may-not eventually boil down to money laundering at the deepest, darkest levels.
The way to legitimize mobile gaming is to take the profit motive out of it. Trash the torrent of in-game ads. Require minimum standards of quality. Enforce the laws that most civilized countries have on the books prohibiting false advertising. Most of all, though, Android is built on Linux, and Linux is all about freedom. Until Google can figure this out and bring that spirit back to Android at a fundamental level, nothing will ever change, and they will simply be content to stagnate until the bottom eventually falls out and they lose everything.
