Fleas, Games, and Tech...Oh My

I have fleas. Or rather, my house is infested with fleas. They are everywhere. No matter where you walk, sit, or stand, the little critters get to munching. My cat has moved into the garage, and the Terminix man is dropping flea napalm everywhere.

I bring this up not to keep you informed about my home life, but to let you know that the so-called technology bust is over (and there never was a bust, just a flood of silly businesses going under). When I was a beat reporter at Wired News, the other digital entertainment journalists and I joked about the crazy future-looking research that made it into the press.

Of course, the sheer information volume also meant that there was much happening.

Over the last month, like the fleas in my house, research reports and white papers on the gaming industry that predict a meteoric adoption rate for new platforms have just appeared in my email.

The latest paper entitled Moore's Law and Electronic Games, which goes public later this month, comes courtesy of Deloitte. Amongst its findings:

• The number of electronic gaming platforms will grow from 415 million to 2.6 billion by 2010
• Processing power will experience an eight-fold increase by 2010 In 2010, 450 million homes worldwide will have broadband connections, with one billion people having access to multimedia mobile phones that could support paid-for electronic games
• Storage capacity will increase to 1,000 gigabytes of disk storage in a typical home PC by 2010
• The growing penetration of multimedia cell phones capable of supporting paid-for games will increase the general uptake of electronic games by women