Microsoft recently demonstrated some technology that would allow gamers to play some of the same titles on their Xbox 360 game consoles, their Windows PCs, and handsets running the upcoming Windows 7 Phone series.
Eric Rudder showed off the technology at TechEd Middle East a couple of days ago – the demonstration showed a simple platforming game that could be played on all of the above devices, seamlessly transferring progress made in the game between the three platformers via cloud computing. You can see the demonstration in the video below.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQv_3fwopo8]
This is all made possible by Microsoft’s Visual Studio development suite, which allows game developers to reuse about 90% of the same code to port the same game to the three different platforms, with the additional 10% of code allocated to platform-specific functions such as control schemes.
Cloud computing is quickly becoming popular in office and productivity apps – see Google Docs and Microsoft’s upcoming Office Web Apps for great examples – but it is still coming into its own in the gaming world. On the positive end of the spectrum, game developer Valve’s popular Steam service will upload game saves for use by the same user on multiple PCs. On the negative side of things, game developer Ubisoft has implemented DRM in some recent titles that won’t allow you to play their titles at all unless your PC is constantly communicating with their servers.
Of course, not all games are going to be playable on both high-powered gaming PCs and low-powered phone handsets – this technology will likely work only with less resource-intensive games such as the simple platformer shown here, not the latest high-end 3D blockbusters. Still, it’s a potentially great strategy to tie together some of Microsoft’s biggest platforms.
More about the Windows 7 Phone platform, including information about the operating system’s gaming capabilities, are due to be announced at the MIX developer conference later this month.
