If you happen to own one of these phones, you’re probably already an avid gamer so this little tidbit will probably fill your stockings with joy. Now a long-time pioneer of cloud-based gaming, OnLive announced on Thursday that they’re updating their free Android app to support the slide-out gamepad of the Xperia PLAY phone.

The Xperia PLAY, a proper beast-of-a-phone designed around a mobile gaming console and a powerful processor, came to market via Sony Ericsson in May 2011. It hasn’t been in the news much, but as an Android gaming platform its certainly got gamers in mind. The addition of support by the OnLive cloud gaming platform will only greatly expand the following and the versatility of this platform.

The original incarnation of the OnLive cloud-gaming platform for mobile arrived in early December and was designed to deliver game content to tablets and other touch-screens. The company extended its service from streaming modern AAA titles to consoles to also be useful on the go with a mobile device, meaning that gamers could get their game on even if they didn’t have a monitor or television handy. OnLive has been making powerful inroads into the gaming community and dragging the personal cloud with it; owning games in the cloud, then streaming them to any device means that gamers have that instant gratification that movie and television viewers can get.

Another worthwhile aspect of OnLive’s service being cloud-based is that it’s becoming truly cross-platform. Players can sit down at home playing their favorite game through the cloud-streaming service, get up and go and transfer it to their Xperia PLAY or other tablet, and finally go somewhere else and launch the service on their PC. All the while, they get to keep the experience of their gameplay, saves, and all the other elements of their hard work in the game. At no point does a player have to pine away about the fact their save games are back at home or in their other pants on a memory chip.

Cloud-based gaming is on the rise

We’ve already seen the impact of the cloud on free-to-play gaming via a report from Pando that shows a 450% increase in subscriptions via cloud-distribution over 3 years. Streaming gaming through the misty efficiency of the cloud will only help boost the vitality of the mobile gaming scene and increase OnLive’s market share.

In fact, we’ve seen other console gaming companies eyeing the cloud for some time now including Microsoft with the newest incarnation of Xbox LIVE—allowing saved games to be uploaded to cloud-backup—and pushing the streaming Internet-TV angle as hard as possible. How long until services such as Xbox LIVE look into cloud-based streaming of games to mobile devices themselves?

They’re already brought out the Xbox LIVE Companion to the mobile and personal cloud scene. Perhaps OnLive will be entrenching themselves for a fight when Microsoft finally turns its gaze from Internet-TV to mobile gaming.