Rob Enderle over at TG Faily has a fairly interesting piece up about the potential future of Google in gaming. What, Google? Did you think Apple was the only computer company considering a move into gaming? According to Enderle, Google may very hold the future to gaming.
Cloud computing, centralized computing or whatever buzz term you’d like to use is being touted as the future of computer software. Essentially, the desktop will be the browser and all software will run remotely on computer servers. This is the same idea that was kicked around in the late 90s with the idea of workstation PCs in every home instead of desktops. Technology hadn’t quite caught up then, but with services such as Meebo and Google Documents it finally is.
Enderle argues that Google could do the same with gaming. The idea of companies subsidizing the selling of hardware to gamers seems antiquated today. Instead, like with the recently announced Quake Live, what if gamers logged into their computer and another system handled all the heavy lifting? This would also do away with the need for constant upgrades on the hardware side, though they would still be required now and again. Sound far fetched?
Well, it is a little bit for now. For one, bandwidth must increase significantly for such an idea to take off. Still, advances in bandwidth technology are being made daily, and more and more money is being invested into the Internet’s infrastructure. The other main question is if this is what gamers really want. Do gamers want to move away from physically purchasing their software into a subscriber type environment (and make no mistake, it would have to be subscriber based in some manner)? It would bring about the fabled unified console, but it would do so very likely with Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft kicking and screaming all the way. Cloud computing may be the future of gaming someday, but its future certainly is cloudy at the moment.
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