Agawi takes its cloud gaming platform to Android tablets

Agawi is announcing today that it will launch its cloud-gaming platform, Agawi CloudPlay, on Android tablets by March.

The platform will take the form of an app available on Google Play, one of the app stores for Android devices. Users who pay for the game service can get access to games that Agawi will make available through the app. By March, the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company expects to have “tens of games” available, and it will release more every week after the initial launch.

“There is a huge library of premium games on the PC, but it is unfortunately locked out of the Android tablets,” said Rajat Gupta, founder of Agawi, formerly known as iSwifter, in an interview with GamesBeat. “We think 2013 will be the year of the tablet.” Market research firm IDC seems to agree; it predicts more than 170 million tablets will ship in 2013.

Agawi can get Flash games and other PC titles to run on tablets by hosting the games in the cloud. It then streams the games to users as they play them, allowing gamers with tablets to play games that were not designed to run on their specific tablets. The appeal for game developers is clear. They can move older games to hot new mobile platforms and generate new revenue without doing much work.

Agawi has been available as an app on the iPad and on Windows 8. On those platforms, Agawi is approaching four million downloads and a million paying tablet users. But in this case, Agawi isn’t operating a direct to consumer business on Android. Rather, it will offer a white-label service for developers, enabling them to launch their own Agawi CloudPlay apps on Google Play.

Agawi’s own initials stand for “any game, anywhere, instantly.” Gupta said it is very easy for developers to adapt a game to run on the platform, which automatically converts a title for use on a touchscreen device. Agawi has already brought 12,000 social web games to tablets via its cloud platform for the iPad and Windows 8. Agawi makes money through flexible profit-sharing programs.

Gupta said the company plans to get core games made by indie game developers onto the Android app first. Developers can contact Agawi by sending a message to cloudplay@agawi.io.