Doom guy: tablets, phones to be gaming platforms of the future

id Software's John Carmack has talked up the future of mobile gaming and why tablets, smartphones and cloud-gaming services such as OnLive will become the dominant gaming platforms.

The man behind FPS classics from Doom to Quake shared his views in an interview with IndustryGamers.

"It’s unquestionable that within a very short time, we’re going to have portable cell phones that are more powerful than the current-gen consoles," he said.

"People have exaggerated the relative powers - the iPad2 is not more powerful than the 360," he admitted. "It’s still a factor of a couple weaker. But the fact that it’s gotten that close that fast - that means that almost certainly, two years from now, there will be mobile devices more powerful than what we’re doing all these fabulous games on right now."

And it's happening quickly: "When we started Rage, iOS didn’t exist. There was no iPhone. All of that has happened just in the space of one project development timeline."

The benefits of mobile gaming shouldn't be underestimated, Carmack reckons: "Convenience is a huge thing. I think that mobile is getting a lot of wins on convenience and I do think that streaming services like OnLive have a future… even though it’s not going to necessarily be the same graphical quality of latency quality, but a whole lot of convenience can make up for [what's lacking]."

There you have it, Commander Keen has spoken, it must be true. What do you think? ®