The competition between Sony and Microsoft has been downright frantic for most of the last year now, and while Sony has been the clear winner for some time now, there are signs that Microsoft is making some gains and posing a serious threat to the clear front-runner. One new sign, however, is showing some serious moves in the background, as Microsoft may be poised to bypass its Rio game-streaming technology with a whole new system known as Arcadia.

Arcadia is actually based on Microsoft Azure, an already-impressive and sublimely potent cloud computing mechanism, and is part of a streaming system developed in the Operating Systems Group, according to current reports. This is actually similar to the way Sony's Gaikai system works, and represents a major new addition to Microsoft's overall profile. Arcadia was also reportedly looked at in terms of running apps as well, but the reports suggest that Microsoft has shut that idea down for now, possibly to put more juice behind the gaming developments. What's more, a job posting recently mentioned points to “non-MS platform experience” as a “plus” in terms of getting the job, which suggests that Arcadia may well end up on places like Android devices or iOS systems.

This represents some interesting possibilities; it may be that we could see Xbox games making their way to iPhones or Android tablets, or any combination of operating system and platform in between. That's an interesting idea, and may well be the start of something that really pulls in the players. Given that there have been concerns in recent months about how console gaming is getting overthrown for casual gaming, maybe this is a way to try and pull casual gamers back into the fold. Conversely, maybe this is a way to keep interest among the current breed of console gamers; it would be nice to see a situation in which a current gaming system plays all the games of the past, and it would also be a good way for Microsoft to really make the move to a digital-only distribution system by offering up the hits of the past alongside the hits of the present, as well as a means to get access to games that couldn't be had just anywhere else.

With the competition mounting in this newest round of the console wars, it's really not surprising to see all the stops get pulled out and all the biggest possibilities start to emerge. While there are still clear problems with depending on an digital-only strategy—the biggest among these being a lack of sufficiently high bandwidth Internet to deliver all that content—the farther along we go, the more likely these problems are to be resolved, especially if we can get more competition into the field. It's still all very early—Arcadia isn't really available yet—but it could be the start of something that's going to change gaming as we know it. Or it may just fall apart under the strain of too many conditions working against it. That's a matter only time will tell, in the end.