Kicking off the afternoon session of Evolve, Tim Closs, CTO of Ideaworks 3D spoke about 'Bringing innovation to multi platform development and deployment'.

There have been many attempts to build cross platform games, Closs said, citing everything from the numbers of devices Tetris has been to released on, to the 12 platforms Angry Birds has been ported to within 18 months, and Microsoft's PC-Xbox-Windows Mobile XNA framework.

"We now use multiple devices, and they are all connected devices," he argued.

"But the future isn't about going cross platform. The network is going to be the game. Devices will just be an expression of this, and supporting them will be the way of reaching your audience."

"Companies that see themselves as console or mobile or Facebook companies are going to fail."

Surfing the wave

There are other trends linking into this.

"Social networks span platforms and this migration of services is enabling viral discovery," Closs said, labelling the trend Social Superdiscovery.

Linked into the App Economy (aka the democratisation of content). This results in the massive oversupply of titles, which outstrips demand, in turn, driving down prices.

Yet digging into how to address this market, many problems arise, including from the monentisation of games that could be available via app store, Facebook, console platform channels, mobile carrier channels or even retail.