This is no kid's game. There's gold in online gaming. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. With more than 430 thousand players around the world shelling out 12.95 a month to play an addictive game called EverQuest... Sony will happily launch EverQuest II this fall. And it will be adding online play capability to the PlayStation II. Nintendo will be doing the same with it's GameCube... .and Microsoft will is launching its online gaming service for the Xbox at a less than expected price of 49.95 for the first year. That includes a headset to enable game players to talk to each other through the high speed Internet connections. Beyond that...

"Over the next five years, Microsoft will be committing two billion dollars to not only strengthen the Xbox platform as it exists today, but to invest and to strengthen the Xbox live online gaming system."

Microsoft's director of worldwide marketing for the Xbox, John O'Rourke. IBM sees a big opportunity to cash in too. It is working with a software development firm to deploy grid based services that online gaming systems can run on. IBM's Scott Burnett...

"The Butterfly Grid promises to wipe away the screen pick ups and the slow reaction time of Internet gaming and make the experience of online gaming as reliable and simple to use as television, radio or the telephone."

The idea is to allow multiple servers to work together forming a super computer of sorts that can handle the traffic when thousands or even millions of glassy eyed video game addicts around the world... .are playing at the same time. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.