cloud-computing posts

While should companies like Microsoft and other PC hardware groups have all the fun. More and more, it appears that phone companies with their already existing infrastructure want to enter the PC gaming business, at least in a behind-the scenes fashion. IndustryGamers has a new chat with AT&T's Executive Director of Gaming Glenn Broderick about their plans.

AT&T already hosts severs and networks for such companies as Blizzard and they have plans to revamp their gaming section of their AT&T.net web site. They also plan to sell downloadable games via a web-based service. Broderick also says the current cloud computing trend for games "will take off in the next 5-10 years" and AT&T wants in on that kind of streaming game service similar to what OnLive is trying to do. AT&T won't comment on how much money they are putting into their gaming services but Broderick stated, "It's more than a million and less than a billion."

In related news, Verizon announced today plans to offer their FIOS and regular Internext customers in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New York a way to download and play over 1,000 PC games for a $9.99 monthly fee (similar to the GameTap service).

The big news of the past week for desktop gamers was the official release of Nvidia's GTX 295 dual-GPU card to the wild. Not content to sit on their hands, AMD announced, via the ever-thrilling Press Release, that they're undertaking development of a platform to provide high-shiny graphics to devices that don't sport the hardware to create them, as well as a realtime rendering system for photorealistic content that developers and cinematographers can utilize.

So, it looks like both ends of the spectrum are getting some love. Maybe even a three-way kind of thing.

At some point, BI's mind will leave the gutter it currently inhabits, but we don't advise anyone to hold their breath waiting for that to happen. (Hey, at least there hasn't been a "Two chips, one card" joke made yet. Oh, wait....)