There are numerous online games that already synchronise various elements of operation across two or more platforms, but there have been no examples of great, synergistic note as opposed to a short-step increase in convenience (such as PopCap's Bejeweled Blitz providing users with a persistent e-wallet across iOS and Facebook, or Zynga requiring smartphone users of FarmVille to login with Facebook accounts). APIs for achieving simultaneous multiplatform solution for segments of the value chain, such as development  and distribution, are proliferating. We are yet to see signs of significant upticks in scale resulting from this unification process, as it is still emerging.

However, the intentions have been made clear, as far as non-specialist platforms are concerned: the four cornerstones of multi-device gaming will be the open browser, the closed browser (e.g. Facebook), iOS devices and Android devices, with the ideal being to offer persistent profiling and interaction elements across all four outlets. This is the ecosystem paradigm, in that we are tending towards a state where gaming experiences become as transferrable and omnipresent as email account access, with users being able to play whatever they want, wherever and whenever they want, and upon whichever device they have to hand, further increasing engagement and lowering boundaries to entry.

It's natural that the first significant salvos of activity in breaching this paradigm will come through games like Scrabble and Words With Friends. Such titles are simple, turn-based and can accommodate severely asynchronous input from users, minimising development overheads plus the network stress involved in simultaneously aligning the disparate userbases. Given the deceptively complex range of standards that need to be integrated to facilitate multi-device play, the spearhead of the ecosystem approach will be long-standing examples of agile casual gaming content, such as traditional/card/puzzle games. We also see slight inroads of this approach in the console space, such as Portal 2's cloud-save facility allowing users to switch between PS3 and PC versions without losing progress, as will also be the case for Activision's Q4 2011 update of the Spyro franchise.