Gaming moving to the next phase

I've been talking about the impact of ubiquitous computing for a while now and specifically what this could mean for middleware. During at least one of the presentations I've given on the subject I've said that I think the way hardware and software are evolving means that the next generation of dedicated gaming consoles is likely to be the last generation of dedicated gaming consoles: hardware in phones and tablets today are at least as powerful as the PS3 and XBox 360 and many of the games you can run on your phone illustrate this quite nicely.

So it was interested that when I was at Google I/O last week to hear the announcement about Google Games. It was disappointing that the keynote demo didn't work out for them at the time, but that's always a possibility with live demonstrations. However, the concept is sound and I expect this to grow to a point where any Android device can participate in cooperative or competitive near real-time multi-player games. Now if only we can persuade Google that they don't need to reinvent the middleware components necessary to make this a reality.