OnLive’s Steve Perlman to keynote at GamesBeat@GDC

Can you really play high-end games on your modest PC, with no downloads?

That’s a multi-billion dollar question. Entrepreneur Steve Perlman wants to make money by giving you a way to do that. Last year, he announced OnLive, a service that lets you play high-end games “on demand,” that is, over the Internet from a conventional low-end PC, and with no download. He’s certainly stirred things up in the gaming world, and we couldn’t be happier that he will be the keynote speaker at our upcoming GamesBeat@GDC conference on March 10 in San Francisco.

Perlman is one of those rare technology pioneers who has stayed in the innovation game for decades, always trying to come up with disruptive technologies.

(By the way, we’ve already announced that John Schappert, chief operating officer of Electronic Arts will speak at a fireside chat at the event.)

Perlman’s Palo Alto, Calif., company is still polishing his product — a service where gamers can play high-end games on any equipment they own. The games are played over a network, with virtually no download required. A bunch of people say this can’t be done. But Perlman, chief executive and founder of OnLive, is betting big time that it can. And a number of rivals have surfaced — Otoy and Gaikai — that are pursuing the same dream.

If the technology works, OnLive could give consumers the freedom to play high-end games on low-end machines, eliminating the need to buy expensive PCs or game consoles. And it could help digital distribution take off, giving game publishers an alternative to selling their games in retail stores.

Perlman announced OnLive a day before GamesBeat and the GDC last year, and it became the talk of the show. It’s taking a long time to pull this off, and that’s why some people wonder if Perlman can do it.

He founded OnLive in 2002, built it to more than 100 employees, and has filed thousands of pages of patent applications for it. His backers include AT&T, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, Autodesk, Maverick Capital, and Lauder Partners.

Perlman himself holds over 90 U.S. patents and has more than 100 applications pending. Previously, he created startups such as Mova, whose face-capture technology is used to create realistic animated faces in games and movies. (It was used to create the photorealistic computer-generated face of Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). He also founded Moxi, a new user interface for cable TV which was sold to Paul Allen’s Vulcan Ventures. He was the co-founder of WebTV, which Microsoft bought for $425 million. He is known as the developer of Apple’s QuickTime multimedia technology. And he remains the head of Rearden, a technology incubator that does research in a wide variety of fields.

Not all of his past ventures were successes. But Perlman always tries to swing for the fences. OnLive is one of his biggest bets yet. And that’s one of the things that makes it so fun. Be sure to catch his speech at GamesBeat@GDC.