In the past few years, the Android game industry has gradually developed, thanks to the bloom of Android mobiles and Tablets. But the majority of Android users want to experience more thrilling and excellent gaming similar to what one can experience in a PC. Recently Agawi, the cloud streaming provider has developed a new platform that allows independent PC game developers to issue their own games to Android devices. Agawi simplifies porting games to the Android platform and developers do not need to give some extra effort.
The Agawi platform has implemented a B2B2C (business-to-business-to-consumer) platform, allowing developers to publish games directly which will be playable on the Agawi CloudPlay app on an android enabled tablet or mobile device. The Agawi CloudPlay app includes “control virtualization tech” that maps a game’s native PC controls to either touch gestures or a virtual gamepad. Presumably Agawi will set up this mapping initially; it’s not yet clear if end users will be able to tweak controls. Let’s hope so. However, the games cannot be purchased, it can only be leased for three days or five days.
The use of technology by Agawi is not new, but there’s little innovation. You must have remembered, long ago Agawi started as iSwifter, an app that allowed running Flash games on iPads. Flash content would actually be processed on iSwifter’s servers and the results would be streamed to the iPad. It was pretty weird stuff back then before the ‘cloud gaming’ space became crammed. In a way, Agawi’s new platform ‘innovates’ the iSwifter idea. In place of flash content, Agawi now supports PC titles.
The advantages of this approach are very clear: no matter how old the user’s device, there will be no lag in the game. However, a major downside of the innovation is connectivity, which is a must for playing and which may consume a lot of data. The available bandwidth even may affect the game quality. There may also be some data loss causing glitches or lag as experienced while streaming a YouTube video.
As for us gamers, we’ll have to wait a bit longer to learn all the require details such as: cost, bandwidth requirements, launch titles and platforms.