Otoy, OnLive, Gakai

Some of you may wonder what the title means... Well... these are the names of three rising giants of the next generation electronic gaming battlefield. I laughed last week when I read somewhere the current game consoles will stay for next three years... Really? In the ever accelerating world full of innovation and with its event horizon shrinking, how anyone dares to predict something developed three years ago will stay for the next three unchallenged? Well... May be they are right, may be neither Sony nor Microsoft is able to reinvent gaming platforms... Actually this is quite likely, as progress very often comes from small challengers who bet everything on one card and have nothing but venture money :) to lose...

So... Faithful readers should at least be familiar with Otoy, as I mentioned it and it's father, Jules Urbach, a number of times. Actually it was Otoy - related news last week that prompted me to touch base on the new developments in gaming. With rendering algorithms migrating to vector processing GPUs that are now becoming building blocks of next generation supercomputers, games can leave for the Cloud. That is exactly what Jules Urbach has been telling us for years - server based processing and scene composition / rendering plus a thin display component on a client device. What we are getting as a result from this architectural change is client device independence. Means we will no longer be tied to PS3s and X360s and HDMI screens. The same game, fully computed, correlated and rendered on the server side will run on almost any client device - be it a smart TV or a laptop or a cellphone.

Architectural change will drive the change in business models. No more buying physical discs. No more buying or any other form of owning at all. Just participating , real role playing. In a mood for a combat? We will be pointing our client devices towards the virtual gaming worlds living in the Cloud and for a small change having the ability to entertain ourselves in a rich, fast moving virtual world of choice. Ultimately there will be no hardware gaming platforms, just gaming service providers. That will drive the cost of developing and selling games down with all resulting implications (consumers will pay less for more). Online games will blend with other forms of visual entertainment, such as Video On Demand and other video streaming / broadcasting services. At thos point it is really hard to predict who will come out victorious from this battle and for how long. One certain thing is the change will come and sooner than many expect. Another is we will consume even more bandwidth with even more appetite for quality of service (latency kills...). This will be just another contributing factor to the general bandwidth consumption trend. Cisco, Juniper, Alcatel, Huawei and their component vendors should celebrate already. Whatever they are able to deliver we will hapily consume...