Steve Perlman, the man behind radical new gaming service OnLive, has fought back at critics who are claiming the service is unworkable

"When we announced [OnLive], we knew people were going to be skeptical," Perlman told Joystiq. "And they should be, you know? But they would go and say, hmm, we've got nine of the top publishers behind this thing; do we really think these guys are gonna take their top titles, commit them for release the same retail window as you know, the titles when they come out for the consoles, and they're gonna let us show games on the floor here, which are actually just being released the day that the OnLive booth opens...?"

Perlman also said that users need to be within one thousand miles of an OnLive server for the service to work properly and, once all five servers are up and running, the service should cover the entire US. 

OnLive, which was announced last week at this year's Game Developers Conference, is a service that lets you play games remotely over the internet.

As OnLive doesn't require users to actually own the hardware a game is running on, its technology has the potential to be hugely disruptive to the games industry. 

But since its announcement OnLive's creators Rearden Labs have faced strong criticism over their ability to deliver video games to large amount of users without lag.

Currently EA, Take-Two, Atari, Ubisoft, THQ, Epic, Codemasters, Eidos and Warner Bros have all agreed to offer their games through OnLive.