Big Fish shows off cloud gaming service

Venture Beat says.

The company showed off the new service at the Casual Connect game conference in Seattle. Will O'Brien, the GM of Big Fish Unlimited, showed off the Grim Tales: The Bride game on the cloud service.

The game requires 732 megabytes of storage, but O'Brien was able to begin playing within seconds. He also showed how he could log on with the same account on a Samsung Galaxy tablet and play the same game.

Big Fish will bring 1 000 of its 2 500 casual games to the cloud service, and all of them will start within four seconds, even if they consume multiple gigabytes of storage on a PC. For the most part, developers won't have to make changes to their source code.

According to Xconomy, Big Fish founder and CEO Paul Thelen noted that connected, cross-platform gaming has been promised for many years but is just now starting to emerge in a real way.

“This is one glimpse of where we think the future is going,” Thelen said.

Big Fish is a veteran of the casual games industry. And while casual games themselves have traditionally been whimsical, carefree diversions, such as Rovio's 'Angry Birds,' the sector is a serious business.

O'Brien said one of the advantages to playing games on a cloud-based service is that progress is saved remotely, allowing gamers to continue their sessions across devices and providing additional flexibility in where and how they want to play, Digital Media Wire notes.

The company offers its games in 10 languages to a global customer base and has further plans to expand Big Fish Unlimited outside the US in 2013, adding the bold claim that its cloud gaming technology is piracy-proof.