The Future Of Gaming

It strikes me looking at the OnLive service (that allows you to play the most recent, amazing games remotely) that these guys will probably fail - due principally to the current shittiness of broadband connections. BUT - and this is a big but - the fact that they have proved that it is POSSIBLE says to me that in the future this will be completely do-able - in fact so commonplace as to be normal. Companies like Sky will eventually get in on the act, and your cable package will have a "games" option that lets you play anything - literally - without having any special hardware (other than the Sky box that will (irrelevantly) be beefier than anything around today). Sure, you'll buy games for 20 yrs or so but they will start to look antiquated - like DVDs in the face of NetFlix or CDs in the Spotify world.

So what does this mean for us here in my little dev studio in Norwich? Well, immediately, I can see that the App Store is not long for this world in the same way - we need to start thinking about delivering our rich applications and games in a hosted way - and initially that means HTML5 / javascript. Hopefully Adobe (or others) will come up with the tools to speed this development - but even before this, I will be investing in this rather than Objective C.

Let's see if I'm right, or this is our doom... (or - is this our doom or our Doom)

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