BlueStacks X is a new free way to play Android games in your browser

BlueStacks started life as an Android emulator for Windows over 10 years ago, allowing anyone to run native Arm or x86 based Android apps on Windows PCs and tablets. Now BlueStacks is transitioning to the cloud, bringing Android games to the browser and on iOS, Windows, macOS, Android, and Linux devices, and even in Discord.

BlueStacks X launched today as the only cloud gaming service that offers free streaming of mobile games across multiple platforms and devices. BlueStacks has built its hybrid cloud technology under its now.gg brand to make this possible, combined with Amazon’s AWS Graviton servers. BlueStacks X also offloads some of the computation and graphics rendering to local devices thanks to advancements in modern web browsers.

The result is the ability to play a variety of Android mobile games in a browser with no download required. BlueStacks X is launching in beta, with around 14 games available to stream and the promise of more titles added every week. Games like Raid: Shadow Legends, Disney’s wizarding arena, and Lords Mobile: Kingdom Wars are all available today. You can also use the standard native app to play over 200 games that are not yet available in the cloud.

BlueStacks has also created its own Discord bot, Cloudy, which will integrate with Discord servers and allow friends to launch cloud-based Android games and share their gaming sessions with others. “We’ll also let you customize the games you want on your server, and if you play those games together, you’ll automatically connect to a Discord voice channel so everyone can just click and play the cloud game,” explains Rosen Sharma, CEO of BlueStacks. , in an interview with The edge.

A social feed will also be built into Discord, so if your friend purchases a weapon in a game, they may appear in the Discord feed much like how PlayStation and Xbox display achievements in their social feeds. “It’s like what Venmo did to PayPal,” Sharma explains. “PayPal only sent money and Venmo made it a social feed.”

Image: BlueStacks

BlueStacks offers all of this for free, supported by ads. Sharma tells me that you will only see pre-roll ads, not the type that will interrupt the game. Ultimately, there could be subscription offers for her cloud-based service as well.

BlueStacks has been focusing on mobile gaming since 2016, after it became clear that its user base primarily uses the app to access games. “When we started, people were like ‘who’s going to use this?’ Sharma admits. “In 2016 it all became about gaming, and gaming became the predominant use case.”

The cloud infrastructure for Arm-based mobile gaming simply didn’t exist 10 years ago, and the appropriate Arm-based servers didn’t start rolling out until 2018 to make BlueStacks X a reality. BlueStacks has grown in popularity in recent years, and Sharma tells me it gets between 250,000 and 300,000 downloads per day. There are even 20,000 corporate customers who use BlueStacks to access Android mobile apps.

The launch and popularity of BlueStack in the cloud comes just as Microsoft is preparing to bring Android apps to Windows 11. Microsoft will not be bringing Windows 11 with its Android app integration, although it does. promised as a key new feature at an event in June.

Image: Microsoft

Sharma, however, does not seem convinced by Microsoft’s Android integration into Windows. “There are two things Microsoft needs to understand: are these apps and is this their way of getting Instagram, TikTok and those things; or is it games? Sharma said. “I don’t think they’re the same beast, and they’re two completely different things.”

BlueStacks has been working with Microsoft for two years to help the company optimize its Hyper-V for Android, Sharma says, noting that the company has focused a lot on the application side. “Microsoft has always had the app problem, and in the past they used to pay people like the best developers to bring in their apps, but it doesn’t really work on mobile because there are just too many apps,” says Sharma. .

While BlueStacks is compatible with Google Play Store apps, Microsoft is partnering with Amazon, which means developers will have to tweak their apps and games to remove key integration with Google Play services. “I feel like any game that requires the developer to do a small amount of work or a large amount of work is a slow and lengthy process,” Sharma explains. “This is unlikely to be successful. ”

Microsoft is moving forward with Android apps on Windows 11, and we’ll likely see a preview of its initial work in the coming weeks. There’s still about 10 years behind the Android app party on Windows, but that might not matter if the integration is done right and performance is solid across multiple devices. It’s easier said than done, however.

Meanwhile, BlueStacks X is launching in the browser today, available at x.bluestacks.com.