“Console guys are running scared,” says Will Wright in an interview over on Games Industry. In the interview Will is asked for his thoughts on cloud gaming, to which he replies,
Will Wright: I think that is going to be the future. People have so many devices they carry around. They have their tablets, their smartphones, their PC at home, their Xbox – I think that having a game that’s accessible on all these devices at any time is going to be much more sticky than something you have to go home and play on your PC or only play on your iPhone. I think in that general sense, it’s going to hit a much broader group of players than dedicated games.
I couldn’t agree more!
Play anywhere on anything against everyone using a single persistent account. With all the gaming devices we’re surrounded by and ubiquitous network access connecting them all together it’s surprising how no game has yet to achieve this goal. There have been a couple of near-hits like Buddy Rush; though these offer a single login and gameplay across multiple platforms they don’t offer simultaneous multiplayer. This last feature is (in my opinion) a sort of holy grail which has the potential to unite gamers across all platforms and devices inside shared persistent worlds.
Cross platform real-time multiplayer links together what were once the separate islands of iOS, Android and web into a single mass community. This will improve player acquisition and retention – and help make marketing dollars spent on a single product more effective across all platforms and devices. It should also result in more engaged (happy) users who are no longer blocked by platform/device barriers when wanting to engage with their friends in the cloud.
This goal has been Spicy’s focus since we left the world of AAA console titles and entered into the F2P, online market. This week I’m happy to announce our first (and I believe the world’s first) truly cross-platform/device game launch with “Crazy Fairies: One World“.
We’ll launch CF into Closed Beta the week of July 16th. If you’re interested in checking it out, head over to the website, register and jump right in! About a month after the launch of the web/online version we’ll publish mobile versions for iOS and Android devices. And as soon as we get our hands on the latest Unity tech you should expect to see an Ubuntu build as well!
2 responses to “Cross Platform/Device Gaming”
Great to see how things are moving!, although there’s at least another multi-device multi-crossplatform game:
http://www.bangvideogame.com
It works across iPhone, iPad and PC in my experience, but it’s also available on other platforms.
It was “Top Game” on the Sunday Times this fall. However, it’s a card game, not an action game… but a very good one indeed.
Anyway, first or not, the more, the better! 🙂
Went and checked out “Bang” and noticed a couple of differences, the main one being that they are only offering the game on iOS and Windows. There are several games out there which do this (the aforementioned Buddy Rush being one of them). I guess the point we’re trying to make is that we’ve “captured them all” in that you are able to play CF on iOS (tablets and phones), Android (tablets and phones), web (PC and Mac) and Ubuntu (as soon as we get our hands on the latest Unity). CF is also running on various web-based gaming platforms such as Kongregate and Facebook.
I’m sure we’ll continue to see evolution in this approach – someone will eventually publish a game that does everything mentioned above AND can be played from 360 and PS3. I guess at that point they could say THEY have the first “true” cross-platform/device (if we don’t beat them there first).