Should gamers try out Chrome OS?

When Google made the announcement about their upcoming Chrome Operating System, the first question that struck me was – What about gaming? Because I use Linux once in a while, (and when I do it is generally Ubuntu) the only way they can get me to use Chrome OS would be through a wider range of games made available through the service.

As of now, Windows continues to have a monopoly over PC based gaming, as there are very few existing games and very few being developed for Mac and Linux . But what needs to be kept in mind is the shift in gaming to browser environment, moving away from PC-hardware intensive gaming. The advantages include — reaching a wider audience, cost-effectiveness, easy distribution and control over piracy, albeit bandwidth intensive.

3D browsing as of now

Business Week had an interesting story a while back on how easy it has become to handle 3D graphics within a browser environment. They even mentioned the effort being put into building 3D games on iPhone, which till recent times, I thought, had very few genuine games. Most of the so-called games were touch-screen implementation of  flash games or just bling elements. The recent launch of games like Doom and the recent news of Duke Nukem being ported to iPhone, all sounds like good news, because if iPhone can handle those games, so can a Netbook with 1GB RAM.

I had earlier blogged about Vector entertainment who are developing a 3D racing game which will work within a browser using v3D engine. In the same story, I even mentioned the progress being made in Java to accommodate 3D objects within an applet. But java applets continue to be resource intensive and until this problem is sorted, the basic objective of games within a browser fails.

Window’s loss, is Google’s loss

If PC gaming move to a browser, Linux will gain a lot much more than any other OS, because primarily it’s free and more flexible than most OSes in the market. Secondly, Chrome is targeting Netbooks, which are low-spec, cheap and well, internet friendly. Gaming on such a platform is inconceivable, if not for a browser approach.

Apart from getting people to use Chrome OS, what does Google gain with an increase in browser based games? Well, most of these browser based games used in-game ads (remember Quake Live ?) for revenue, rather than charge users to play a game. We all know that Google is the king of contextual advertising, they can definitely use their platform to sell ads within a game. That said, in-game ads are a different ball game altogether. There is no option to click on an ad, you can leave a few bullet marks on the ad if you may. So technically speaking, in-game ads function as hoardings and lack the interactivity/customisation associated with Google ads.

But if they find a good work around and contribute to the developing support for 3D in browsers, they have a chance to push Windows out. Until then, I will happily stick with the “evil-empire”.

On Netbooks

When Google announced that the OS they made it pretty specific that their OS will be tailored to Netbooks. It needs to be remembered that the Netbook trend caught up just because of recession. What after recession? Will people continue to splurge money on high-end systems or will people opt for cloud based packages? If the latter turns out to be the future, Google just be able to do what they intend to do.