At a time when millions of us are being told to stay at home, there isn’t much reason to reach for our phones and burn through our batteries three times a day. PUBG Mobile, while obviously designed to be played on handheld devices, has official emulator support, meaning you can play it at home on practically any computer or laptop.
No matter where you are in the world, your average PC can probably run PUBG Mobile better than your mobile phone. Give your tiny device a break, sit up at your desk, and let us guide you back to the world of the keyboard and mouse combo.
Step 1. Download Gameloop (Tencent Game Buddy)
Sometime last year, we published a roundup of all the best PUBG Mobile emulators capable of running the game. Tencent Game Buddy took the crown for its ease of setup, but its the official Tencent branding that makes it the only truly necessary recommendation one year on. The emulator shed its Tencent moniker sometime last year to emerge simply as Gameloop. But as anyone who’s used it before will tell you, it’s still the same program with all the same key features — and it’s still made and distributed by the game’s publisher.
If you’re afraid of Tencent flagging your account as a potential hacker for playing the game on an emulator, just remember that Gameloop is its own program that it actively advertises as a way for people to play PUBG Mobile on something other than a powerful phone or tablet. You’re absolutely free to play PUBG Mobile on another emulator featured in our roundup, but we’ll be focusing on Gameloop here to make things as quick and easy as possible.
To download Gameloop, all you need to do is head to the Gameloop website here, or search Gameloop in Google and hit up the result with the .mobi domain. The .Fun one works to a degree, but we kept ending up with the Chinese language install no matter which language we specified on the download page. So safe you from that hassle, just click the Download PUBG button on the .Mobi site to get everything in one go (and in English).
Step 2. Install and Update Gameloop on Your PC
Once you’ve downloaded the program, run the installer and follow the on-screen instructions. You should probably read up on the minimum requirements here, but given it only requires a mid-range GPU from 10 years ago, it’s safe to say any PC bought within the last five years will be able to run it just fine from the integrated graphics chip on its Intel or AMD CPU.
With the install finished, you might see the emulator download and install a couple of updates and key services. It’s an Android emulator, after all, so it’s basically setting up a virtual phone/tablet in the background. The kind developers would use to create their apps.
Step 3. Download PUBG Mobile (or any other game)
Once that’s all up and running, you just need to create an account and get signed in. From that point on it’s as simple as heading to the program’s app store equivalent and downloading PUBG Mobile. It’s by far the emulator’s key use-case, so you’ll see banners and buttons for the game all over the place ready to start the process.
You’re not just limited to PUBG Mobile, though. Gameloop has a bunch of officially supported Android games like Call of Duty Mobile, Arena of Valor, and MMORPGs and idle games. If you’ve been held back by PUBG Mobile sapping your limited phone storage space, now’s the time to try out a few other games. Fill up that hard drive!
Step 4. Tweak the Emulator Settings
Now before you jump into PUBG Mobile, you might want to tweak a few settings for the emulator itself to ensure it’s running at its best on your system. Click the three horizontal lines icon in the top-right of the screen to find them.
You’ll probably want to leave the renderer on its default Auto option, but you can tweak things like emulator resolution and its screenshot directory — this way you can make the emulator window fill your screen from that full UI feel and ensure your comedic kills and bug reports aren’t lost to some far-off folder buried deep in your recovery drive.
The major settings you might want to change are things like memory allowance and processor threads. If these don’t mean anything to you, leave them on their defaults. But if you know how much memory or CPU threads you’re able to spare, increasing or decreasing these options can help ensure your system copes with the load of PUBG Mobile on top of its other crucial background tasks.
With an emulator like Gameloop, you’re essentially running a second system within Windows. So if you don’t want general computing speed to grind to a halt on a lesser machine, you’ll want to ensure Gameloop isn’t sapping too many resources your computer needs to run Windows efficiently. On a high-end machine, you’ll likely have lots of computing power going spare while running a PUBG Mobile emulator, so either leave things be and just accept them, or increase or decrease the emulator’s allowances to run exactly how you’d like.
Then there’s the general Game settings tab. Again, you’ll want to leave this on the default 720P option if you’re not too sure of the power of your machine, but if you know what you’ve bought, you can up this to 1080P or even 2K if your screen goes that high. This purely controls the size of the gaming window. Display Quality, the option below, refers to the internal render resolution of the game in question, so it’s this one you’ll want to crank up to HD if you think your PC can handle running PUBG Mobile at a higher internal resolution. Again, if this means nothing to you, leave both settings on Default.
Step 5. Tweak the PUBG Mobile In-Game Settings
Ok, now it’s time to boot up PUBG Mobile. Assuming all the downloads have finished. Your mouse cursor fills in for touchscreen taps on the main menu. Log into your account as you normally would and head into the Settings menu to ensure the game runs at its best. You’ll have you usual selection of graphics options here, but you might be able to push these higher if your PC is significantly more powerful than your phone.
Sadly, emulation takes its toll. It’s far more taxing to run an emulator on nonspecific hardware, so to avoid all the jumps and jitters emulation can flair up, it’s generally suggested to knock PUBG Mobile emulator settings to Balanced (or Smooth) and disable both Anti-aliasing and Shadows. Crank that Frame Rate setting up to Extreme to enable that all-important 60 FPS, though. This is a competitive game, so smooth and consistent frame rates are far more important than a pretty tree or two. You can read more about why these settings matter over here.
Step 6. Set Your Keybinds and PLAY!
The wonderful thing about Gameloop is its plug n’ play attitude to PUBG Mobile. All of those touch controls are automatically mapped to keys, and you’ll even see these prompts laid on top of the game’s usual UI.
For the most part, it’s WASD to move, your mouse controls the camera and your aim, left click to shoot, C to crouch, Shift to run, and M to open the map. R is your reload key, E interacts with things like doors in Hardcore mode, and each item in a stack on the floor will get its own pickup prompt like F, G, or H. You can change all of these in the keybinds menu on the right side of the window. These work by imagining a keypress as a tap on a single point of the screen, so you’ll need to use this to reposition floating buttons if you’re moving your UI around in-game. For a reminder of core controllers, they’re on the right-hand side, too. Nifty!
Gameloop is by far the easiest PUBG Mobile emulator to set up. It even has controller support that we might touch on in the future. But for the most part, it’s not the smoothest, most reliable way to play PUBG Mobile. It’s just potentially the most comfortable if you don’t like wrapping your digits around a toasty smartphone all day.
Disclaimer: Fanbyte is owned by Tencent, which also runs Tencent Games, developer and publisher of PUBG Mobile. Tencent also subsidizes much of Fanbyte’s PUBG Mobile coverage by covering freelancer budget costs. Those covering PUBG Mobile for the site have no contact with Tencent, however, and are given complete creative control to write whatever they wish.
