OnLive, a USA-based company, has announced that it will bring its cloud server supported games to Apple iOS and Google Android tablets later this year.
It will release the OnLive Player App in September-October for US and Europe regions. The subscription based digital game distribution service, OnLive, will allow tablet owners to play top game titles on their Android or iPad tablets.
Users can enjoy games without installing them. However, one would have to pay some monthly subscription fee to enjoy gaming anywhere, provided a decent connection is available.
Cloud servers based entertainment is the future for tablets and smartphone owners. Several services are available that store everything on cloud servers – right from movies to documents. The only link missing in the chain has been ‘gaming’.
Cloud based gaming scores over the traditional type as it does not require the user to install games on their devices. Also, it frees up the limited space available in devices and also makes additional hardware unnecessary.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that you can play all PC or console games on your portable device but there are special games for different platforms:
The social gaming phenomenon FarmVille by Zynga was launched for iOS devices last month. (That includes the iPad.) Hence, several FarmVille addicts would be ploughing their farms using their iPads.
However, Android hasn’t been blessed with a separate app since the game is Flash based and the latest Adobe Flash Player 10.3 is supported by the platform, unlike on Apple devices, which don’t support Flash and need specially built apps.
The cloud computing trend will obviously bring richness to tablet and mobile platforms. Though there’s a rise in cloud based services and promotions in India, so far there’s no service available that allows full-fledged entertainment through cloud servers. Also, there is no dearth of cloud computing companies or game development companies in India.
Hopefully in the near future we will see a couple of Indian companies launching games on demand services similar to OnLive.