If you have been following the (increasingly misnamed) Design-a-Day posts (and a few of you have), you will know I have made some bold assertions regarding the roadmap for future games development.

It was therefore gratifying to see some of the movers and shakers in the industry make announcements this week that amount to first steps toward the Chrome Cow’s mad, glorious vision for the future.

I direct you first to the lads in Redmond, as Microsoft introduces their Live Anywhere strategy. To quote the Gamasutra article,

One of the biggest announcements at E3 was that Microsoft is developing Live Anywhere, a network infrastructure that will allow players to communicate and interact seamlessly with the Xbox 360, Windows Vista PCs, and Windows Mobile and Java-based mobile phones.

Combine this with John Carmack’s latest announcement about Massively Multiplayer Cellphone Games (via CNN),

"We’re probably going to have a sequel to ‘Orcs and Elves’ but I’m really into the idea of a massively multiplayer cell phone title," he said. "I have absolutely no interest in going and competing with Blizzard in the high end of that market, but a cell phone version might be interesting." John Carmack

Now we are getting very close to the kind of persistent, cross platform and multi-game shared universe that I have proposed in various guises in Towards a Better World, Cross Dressing: AR Across Platforms and Open.World.

One Universe, many games, many platforms. You heard it here first.