Cloud power to give mobile gaming major boost

Now even that frontier appears to be coming down as mobile devices gradually come to define the early 21st century.

The New York Times reports that "OnLive, a Silicon Valley start-up, on Thursday plans to release software that will let people play the richest, most graphically intense games on Apple's iPhone and iPad, as well as on Amazon's Kindle Fire and other devices based on Google's Android software."

OnLive, as well as many others like GaiKai, are working to use the power of the cloud to deliver sophisticated games over the Internet to devices which don't necessarily have that much internal power themselves.

Gaming blog, Inside Gaming Daily has a neat summary about the work OnLive is doing: "OnLive has blazed a trail in cloud gaming, which means streaming the latest games to your PC or Mac, or to your TV via the Micro Console, or now to your mobile device. The company offers a range of plus points for consumers, game publishers, and, of course, the host company itself: you can play on your machine, on your TV, now on your handheld without requiring any purchase from a bricks-and-mortar store; publishers are assured a piracy-free environment since the content is streaming directly to the consumer; OnLive takes its cut of that game sale revenue."

A big challenge

One of the principal challenges for high-end gaming is to eliminate any trace of a lag between an action and a result. High-end gamers need instant responses to their actions as "even split-second delays can turn serious gamers off."

Looking into the future, analysts predict that, if this system is successful, then new hardware platforms for gaming might become a thing of the past. What sense does it make to develop new PSPs or Nintendo Gameboy's when the world's most innovative games can run on the iPads, Kindle Fire's and Android-devices that consumers already own?

Steve Perlman, the chief of OnLive predicts optimistically that "It's our view that probably there won't be another console and that this current generation is the last. The economics can't support it anymore."

Ultimately though, delivering mobile gaming experiences via the cloud will rely heavily on whether the makers of these games trust that the experience will be good enough for their fans. If companies like OnLive can convince those developers, then chances are that we are about to witness another wave of revolutionary change on the mobile device.