With Microsoft's Xbox 360, Nintendo's Wii and Sony's PlayStation 3 duking it out for dominance of the video game console market, can there possibly be any room for yet another machine?
Steve Perlman, a well-known Silicon Valley inventor and entrepreneur, thinks there is. His strategy is to make a game system without game discs.
His OnLive game service works by keeping all of its games in the cloud. Consumers can stream the games to their PCs after installing a browser plug-in. Starting in December, users will be able to stream games to their televisions using a $99 box not much bigger than a cigarette package that taps a high-speed Internet connection, the company said two weeks ago.
OnLive faces considerable obstacles. Working against it are an initially limited inventory of games, a well-established console business run by corporations with deep pockets and a resistance among consumers to add one more box to their home entertainment systems.
