During the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco earlier in the year, Steve Perlman revealed to the world an ambitious videogame project called OnLive. In a nut shell, the service is a new way for gamers to play their favorite videogame, but not actually own any hardware. All they would need in theory is a computer, even an inexpensive one at that, hooked up to the Internet and they could play pretty much any advance game using just a web browser. Basically, the games players would be playing, are being streamed from a sever hundreds of miles away to their computer or television.

The service was with met with a bunch of speculation from all sides of the spectrum. Some people thought it was the future of the industry. While others thought the technology would be too imperfect and the problems customers would face, would ultimately kill the idea. No one knows exactly what kind of impact OnLive is going to make, but it certainly has made an impression to the videogame universe.

Today marked an important day for OnLive because the “cloud” gaming service has entered into its first closed beta stage. The announcement was just posted on Steve Perlman blog. “I’m very excited to say that we are now opening the OnLive Beta to outside gamers who signed up on our website,” wrote Perlman. “It’s not too late to sign up if you haven’t already. We are very much looking forward to hearing from gamers all about their experience with the OnLive Service.” “[The] beta is an AWESOME milestone for OnLive, capping many years of work. We’re really looking forward to hearing what you think,” he later wrote.

I for one am excited about the possibility of OnLive. While it’s hard to argue to think there won’t be any issues with trying to stream a videogame using the Internet, it’s also hard to believe this couldn’t be the future. The idea of playing the most advance videogames in my home but not have to worry about spending money on hardware, is intriguing.