1UP News was at 2008 GDC, and based on the Mobile presentations by certain company 1UP speculates World of Warcraft may indeed come to the Mobile market. Vollee—fairly young company—has allied with Activision, which recently merged with Vivendi Games under the name Activision Blizzard. The explanation on how a massive MMO can play on a cellphone is simple, World of Warcraft might play as a stream straight from a back end server similar to PTR … which means, the cellphone won’t have to render the 3D graphics. Does that sound exciting to you? Again this wasn’t an official statement from Blizzard, but a 1UP analysis after the independent mobile presentation at 2008 GDC. (Read More)
Vollee’s big idea is reliant on their relationship with publishers. Linden Labs, which produces Second Life, and Activision, which now owns Blizzard, have already announced a partnership with Vollee. Since Second Life proves that PC MMOs can be streamed to cellphones, the idea of 10 million World of Warcraft users accessing their accounts and controlling their characters remotely starts to seem much more likely.
Vollee works in a similar fashion to online TV and other streaming multimedia. Vollee, Ltd runs the game off servers on the back end, and constantly pipes information to the user’s phones, so the game isn’t actually being rendered on the phone. Your 3G (third generation) phone only has to run Vollee’s 100 kb client, and the game will stream continually from their servers. Better make sure you’re not paying by the bit, however, because Vollee’s model only makes sense with an unlimited data access plan.
