E3 2011 – Day 2 thoughts

So following Day 2 of E3 (or Day 1, if you exclude the pre-show?), here’s what stood out for me:

OnLive, the cloud-based game service, announced iPad and Android apps: This is not completely news – streaming games to tablets was one of Gamestop’s stated motivations for the Spawn acquisition; and last week, OnLive announced a unique controller that, it said, would work with tablets. And the collection of games on OnLive’s website is currently underwhelming – but that is not set in stone. I don’t know whether OnLive will be able to shift gaming towards a software as a service model or marginalise dedicated gaming hardware. I do think that it’ll be worth keeping an eye on those possibilities. (VentureBeat article, and video, here.)

Honourable mention goes to Nintendo’s Wii U – it’ll be interesting to see what developers can do with a controller that has its own touchscreen. If Nintendo region-locks the console, though, as it did for the Wii, that would likely be a dealbreaker for me.