Tag Archives: OnLive
Gaming Could be a Possible Growth Area for Google
Posted on 17. May, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 
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Last week, TechCrunch deftly pointed out that Google is on the hunt for someone to fill the role of Product Management Leader, Games. Currently, Google really does have too much going in the gaming market. It did, however, recently purchase LabPixies which creates widget-like games for the iGoogle portal as well as making games for Apple products, Android systems and social networking sites.
So the gaming arena could in fact be another engine of growth for Google, one that diversifies the company from advertising and its stated goal of profiting from enterprise cloud applications. If they move aggressively in this space, they may find themselves at an advantage when you consider that the console industry is now experiencing an overall decline in sales. More often than ever, multipurpose devices such as the iPad and smartphones allow people more flexibility to play video games without having to pay a lot of money for gaming titles. This is also true when you consider how successful some companies have become offering games on social networks.
Even some internal Google employees have ported a first person game like Quake II to the browser as one of their projects. Games are now capable of being ported over to HTML5 and run in the current generation of browsers, such as the Asteroids port that is available at the Chrome Experiments site.
Even OnLive, which plans on streaming games to your PC or television, will be launching this summer, allowing gamers to play their favorite titles from top publishers in an entirely new way. Although the bandwidth requirements may be quite high, OnLive is dubbing their service as “the future of gaming” which is most likely true.
Bottom line? There is a lot of room for Google to grow in gaming since their footprint right now is nascent. I would not be surprised if they would go with the now-classic free model that is supported by advertising, expertise that a mobile ad company like AdMob can lend to Google’s wealth of knowledge from utilizing AdWords on web sites and Apps like Gmail. That is, if the Federal Trade Comission ever approves the Google-AdMob deal.
Chrome to Have 3D Apps This Summer
Posted on 31. Mar, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments
In an interview conducted with India’s Economic Times Ian Fette, a product manager for Google’s Chrome browser says that we should be expecting three dimensional applications to be available sometime this summer. When asked what new applications one could expect for Chrome this year, Fette’s response was candid.
“This summer, we will launch 3D apps via Chrome. Thus users will not have to download a 3D platform to play or view 3D games. Just visiting a website via Chrome will do the job”, says Fette.
A lot of talk has gone on about making Chrome the defacto application that allows everything to sun inside the browser. This is in tandem with the effort has been put into Native Client, which allows further compatibility for resource intensive processes to run inside Chrome browser. Now that Flash will get deeper integration, it will be interesting to see how this revelation develops.
There has been talk of some companies providing cloud services for gaming that can be done inside the browser. On example of this is OnLive, which incidentally is panning on launch in June and allows for gaming through a browser plugin. The theory for this sounds great, but one has to wonder how much processing can be pushed through a network that can be variable like the internet is (the requirements say you need 1.5Mbps). Plus, the server architecture sounds pricey from something like this to run smoothly, although OnLive could start out small and scale up as needed.
Regardless, this is a promising development. 3D worlds like Second Life could become easier to use by just navigating to a URL in a browser. There are implications to this that cannot even be fathomed at this time. It certainly would give Chrome a boost in popularity if for a time it is the only browser capable of this type of functionality.
