Gizmodo posted an article about former Xbox exec Sandy Duncan predicting the death of gaming consoles in 5-10 years. While on the surface this seems to have nothing to do with mobile gaming, bear with me. Duncan suggests that consoles will be dead because of cluster computing, which is the idea that consoles will become little more than a box with a broadband connection to some heavy-duty servers. These servers handle all the graphics and the number crunching, then simply send the resulting video back to the console to display it.
The implications for mobile gaming are pretty profound. Phones do a million things, and games are rarely high on the list of priorities. With cluster computing, developers would be free to design games that require higher tech specs than you find on most handsets. They would have to contend with the smaller screen and the buttons designed without gaming in mind, but the former is handled admirably by PSP/DS developers and the latter is becoming less of an issues as touch screens become more common. Of course, some people say that broadband is very far from being fast or lag-free enough to do anything of this nature, but it’s a very interesting avenue to pursue.
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