Talking as part of an in-depth new interview at Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra, Battlefield Heroes senior producer Ben Cousins has called the death of PC gaming "a crazy idea", suggesting that "hundreds of millions" of game-compatible PCs mean a bright future on the platform.

The Electronic Arts-published Battlefield Heroes, which will debut later this year, is a free to play title that is funded by in-menu/website ads and microtransactions.

When discussing the hypothesis that consoles are a 'niche market' in some ways, Cousins explained:

"If you look at the amount of PCs that are out there, we're talking hundreds and hundreds of millions; if you look at the amount of PS3s and 360s, we're talking tens of millions, barely. So, absolutely, people think that the PC is dying, but that's a crazy idea...

I think we're going to continue to see high-end packaged good games on the PC. But I think they're going to, as you say, have an element of connectivity; they're going to have an element of persistence which you need to be connected online to do; and they're going to be, probably, more multiplayer focused."

Further on in the interview, Cousins expanded on the possibilities for worldwide growth of games, both on and off consoles - and especially internationally, explaining:

"I think you saw a huge growth in the industry when the NES came out, and then again when the PlayStation came out. I mean, people didn't realize that -- people felt that all of the growth had been done, but it really feels like, to me, that we're on the cusp of another expansive period of growth, between the DS and the Wii audiences, and there's also an opportunity on the PC now.

PCs are everywhere -- there are hundreds of thousands of internet cafes in India, and this is a poor country that soon will have a completely global, online connected world, for which games will be completely different."

You can now read the full Gamasutra interview with Cousins for a more in-depth look at his views, including much more on the ad/microtransaction powered whimsical take on the Battlefield franchise he's currently working on.

Nexon America commercially launched Mabinogi just recently, following an open beta. The company says it will roll out the story in a series of chapter-themed upgrades, and this commercial launch presents the first chapter.

The commercial launch of Mabinogi, which claims over 7 million players in Asia, also adds the ability to purchase items through Nexon's cash shop, as players of MapleStory can, and KartRider players are expected to. The publisher earns the majority of its revenue through the free-to-play, pay-for-items business model.

3D software and services company Simmersion Holdings has announced $1.9 million in funding from Blue Cove Ventures and Hikari Private Equity, and says it will use the investment to launch a social network and virtual world platform to be called Mycosm.

The company says users can import 3D content to build their own worlds and share them online to play games, exchange media, "make money" and socialize with friends. The platform is set to enter private beta later in 2008 and is currently accepting invite applications on its site.

Simmersion also aims to license its platform to corporate customers for business applications. Says CEO Bob Quodling, "We are tackling the core problems with
virtual worlds: low fidelity, too technical, no control, no fun and no friends. Mycosm brings the
power of a compelling virtual world platform to everyday users for free.”

With virtual worlds a continually evolving global phenomenon, what are the issues that affect developers creating titles that may be played in a multitude of different cultures? At the recent ICE 08 conference in Toronto, a panel featuring Matt Daly (Metaversatility); Barbara Lippe (Avaloop) and Adrian Crook (freetoplay.biz) discussed these issues, with Lippe detailing features of Avaloop’s social MMO Papermint, currently in English-language beta.

After an introduction from moderator Lucie Lalumière, vice president of interactive at Earth Rangers (an initiative that intends to inspire children to care about the environment) Barbara Lippe began the session with a short video of Papermint in action, a “friendly social networking game” with a visual style that could best be described as “Parappa the Rapper in pastels.”

Lippe detailed the idea behind Papermint: aimed at a “60% female, 40% male” audience between 25-30 years old, “It’s World of Warcraft with much more social meaning, or it’s Facebook with much more game.”

Lippe then explained the unusual way in which characters are created in Papermint. “When you start playing, you are the child of two already established players. It’s not easy! Those players must first find each other, fall in love and be successful at the ‘child making game’ in order for you to exist!”

Her look at Papermint’s features included some discussion of the online world’s sustainable economy. All players in the world survive by eating mint, but it is rare in the world and if picked excessively can die out. When launched in Austria, Lippe described, “Players picked it until it ran out -- and the entire community died. But players learned and started to protect the mint on the second time round. They’d defend it round the clock and tell new players off for picking too much. Certain players actually formed a religious cult around the protection of mint!”

“We don’t have a help page, but the players understood it from their mistakes,” Lippe said, while making the case that virtual worlds offer the ability for communities to work together and learn en masse.

Cultural Differences

“Virtual worlds are cultures, but you have to take care and make sure you localize them to the culture they are based in,” Lippe continued, drawing on her experience of launching Papermint in Germany and Austria, and the preparations for launch in an English-language version.

“Germans and Austrians don’t care about MySpace,” she explained as an example, “and they don’t use Facebook that much yet, though I think that will change. Another example is that in Japan they prefer [social network] Mixi, because it’s perfect for people to socialize in a much more private manner, unlike MySpace where everything is out in the open.”

Metaversatility's Daly agreed. “It’s interesting that these games and networks break down borders, but due to cultural differences and technology differences that we’re reaching a second level of barrier. I’m not sure what effect is going to be – are all our differences going to be homogenized or will we see even more diversification within cultures due to the external influences?”

Adrian Crook used his understanding of the free to play PC game market to explore the differences between cultures. “Free to play exists because games needed to be accessible on the fly from wherever you were due to ‘PC Baang’ [internet café] culture in South Korea. As a result, game play tends to be more competitive over there. North American gamers like to play PvE [Player versus Environment] better than PvP [Player versus Player] perhaps because while in a PC Baang you might be sitting next to the person you’re battling, and be able to set up a rapport, here you tend to be sitting at home alone.”

Lipstick On Your Collar

Papermint uses the “free to play” model, and Lippe announced that the title uses a similar revenue stream to most free to play titles -- item sales.

“Because it’s a social space anything that ‘pimps out’ your avatar is the best way to raise money,” she joked. “We work a lot with fashion designers on creating new costumes, and they can cost up to 60 Euros [$95 US] for a full outfit!”

“You have to buy the best stuff to get people interested in you,” she admitted, “they look great, I made them, but I never thought that people would buy them -- that people in Austria would have so much money to spend on such things!”

Of course, the attention people lavish on you might get you in trouble, particularly with Papermint’s ability for in-game character to marry each other: “A lipstick mark won’t fade for 12 days,” Lippe laughed, “It’s a real problem in Papermint if you’re already married and your spouse finds one of those!”

Snow Crash

The panel moved on to look at user-generated content, and the way in which, as seen in Second Life, different users wishes and expectations can lead to a wildly incongruous aesthetic.

“When I read Snow Crash in 1992 I couldn’t have believed that there would be a world that offers what was talked about in the book by now. I admire Second Life for that, but aesthetically it just doesn’t work for me,” Lippe said. “In Papermint there is a lot of user-generated possibility, but everything has some limits. It’s more fun for users not to be overwhelmed by the possibilities and for it to fit into the world.”

Crook agreed: “Too much choice is a bad thing. It scares people off -- people want total free choice but they don’t really want it. I think in the tailing off of these true user-generated worlds we see great evidence of that.”

In conclusion, Lalumière asked if there was a core message that the panelists felt people creating virtual worlds should keep close to their hearts. Lippe asked creators to “not just jump on the ‘3D train’” and to create a look, warning people that they must make sure to “take care of their art,” but Crook warned in turn that first and foremost developers must take care of their revenue stream.

Online voice services provider Vivox has announced that Multiverse will include Vivox voice in its Multiverse Platform, a development platform for virtual worlds.

Multiverse grants development teams free use of its platform with full SDK access, documentation, starter assets and sample worlds through revenue-sharing plans. The partnership with Vivox will allow developers to access pre-integrated voice chat and communications features.

Additionally, developers will be able to use 3D positional audio, buddy lists, presence, speaking indicators and management tools. Premium features such as voice fonts and voice mail will also be available.

Vivox customers and partners include online game and virtual world companies 1GPN, Inc., Alpha Innovation, BigWorld Technology, CCP Games, The Electric Sheep Company, FWD International, IBM, Icarus Studios, Illusion Factory, K2 Network, LanguageLab.com, Linden Lab, Monumental Games, Pixel Mine and Wizards of the Coast. The company was recently named a Front Line Award winner by Gamasutra's sister print publication, Game Developer Magazine.

Multiverse co-founder and CEO Bill Turpin commented, “Virtual worlds are three dimensional realms with increasingly complex social structures that demand strong, proven communications to thrive. By partnering with Vivox, we are enabling virtual world developers to quickly add Vivox’s superior voice services with minimal development effort or financial commitment. Our customers will be able to include feature-rich voice services designed specifically to enrich the virtual world experience with the full support of the Vivox team.”

The House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on telecommunications were concerned about, among other things, the idea of virtual worlds becoming the next breeding ground for terrorist recruitment. According to Reuters, Rosedale had a response to that: "We have never seen any evidence that there is any such activity going on."

California democrat Rep. Jane Harman was quoted as calling online worlds "glorious technology" as she expressed a desire not to see it abused; Rosedale stressed self-policing and cooperation with law enforcement as preventative measures to feared abuses. He also said he feels that keeping law and order in the virtual world is "somewhat more maintainable" than it is in reality.

It wasn't all dignified, of course. Jokes about Congress already being a "virtual world" proliferated, while TechSoup founder Susan Tenby quite sincerely defended virtual worlds' potential as a home for positive advocacy groups and learning -- before introducing the representatives to her alter-ego, Glitteratica Cookie, a pink cat who lives in Second Life, as recounted by the Mercury News, and the House was also visited by "Ward Heeler," "Pica Paperdoll," "Socrates" and other avatars.

IBM's Colin Parris was also in attendance to discuss virtual worlds' numerous business applications, while all of the attendees sought to reassure Congress' concerns about child safety, privacy and other commonly controversial issues.

At the Washington Post, Mike Musgrove described this go-round between avatars and politicians as "a bit less chaotic" than when aimlessly floating Second Life avatars disrupted a visit by former Virginia governor Mark Warner.

Linden Lab and IBM have announced that they're teaming up to run Second Life on servers inside IBM's firewall, for IBM internal projects. The two companies plan to pilot the service to allow other companies to run Second Life inside their firewalls by year's end, and make the service generally available later on.

Using the service being tested by IBM, its users will be able to log in to the private server behind IBM's firewall, and move back and forth between that and the public Second Life grid, taking their avatars and possessions with them.

IBM will use the service for conferences, special events, and meetings.

"This is really about satisfying a market demand," said Ginsu Yoon, Linden Lab VP for business affairs. "There are enterprises that can be very comfortable with a hosted service, and there are customers who really want to have things inside their infrastructure." Linden Lab wants to be able to serve both groups.

The IBM announcement comes at a tough time for Second Life. The service saw explosive signup and growth rates in late 2006 and early 2007, but growth stalled later in the year. The number of dedicated users -- people who spend significant amounts of time in-world -- has been flat since late last year, at about a half-million users. Overall, users have created 13.1 million Second Life accounts since the service launched four years ago.

Big companies flocked to Second Life for marketing last year, but since then many companies, including American Apparel, Starwood Hotels, and Pontiac, have left the service (although some, like Starwood, said they always planned only a limited-time engagement). Other companies, like IBM, Cisco Systems, and Playboy, continue to operate in Second Life. And the service has a thriving culture of small businesses that operate only in Second Life.

Among the problems driving users away: Second Life is unstable, difficult to use, and users need to be running relatively powerful desktop computers. Philip Rosedale, co-founder of the company, said last month he's stepping aside as CEO, and the company is searching for a new CEO who can bring veteran management skills.

IBM is using virtual worlds technologies from Linden Lab and Activeworlds to offer "rehearsals," or training exercises, to its services team, said Jim Spohrer, director of service research for IBM Almaden Research Center.

IBM simulates project management and customer interaction in virtual worlds, he said.

Rehearsal services in virtual worlds provide the benefits of of face-to-face rehearsals and role-playing, while saving time and travel costs, Spohrer said. Also, virtual worlds are flexible in ways that reality isn't. "You can experiment with a lot of alternatives and designs," Spohrer said. "Also, as you start developing these rehearsal services, you can start reusing the components from one service to another."

[The preceding article by Mitch Wagner first appeared in Worlds in Motion's fellow United Business Media publication, Information Week.]

At the 2008 Virtual Worlds Conference in New York, Multiverse revealed that consumers can now enter any world built on its platform either through the company's 3D world browser or through web-embedded Flash.

Multiverse's goal in enabling this is to prevent developers from needing to choose whether to develop in 2D or 3D. During the conference, the companies demoed its virtual Times Square prototype both ways -- through the Multiverse World Browser and then through the web. Users of either method can interact in Multiverse worlds simultaneously.

Flash developers gain access to the scalability of Multiverse's platform, which can handle, the company says, up to 2,000 logins per server. The gain for 3D developers is the ability to reach a broader audience through the web -- different user groups prefer to approach their online interaction in different ways, and since the same project can be accessed either as 3D through Multiverse or Flash through the web, the result is likely to be fewer limitations for developers.

Multiverse co-founder and executive producer Corey Bridges explained, "Developers of Flash games can now benefit from the most scalable and customizable servers in the virtual world industry. With these new capabilities, we'll soon see true virtual worlds appearing on social networks like Facebook and MySpace. The intersection of virtual worlds and social networks starts here."

VastPark seems to be ramping up its announcements -- out of the Virtual Worlds conference, it's revealed a couple of new partnerships. Just prior to the event, it signed an agreement with NICTA, Australia's Information and Communications Technology Research Center, and held its first multi-user stress test.

Now it's formed a relationship with TurboSquid to access that company's catalog of 3D models. TurboSquid claims more than 195,000 3D models in its library, and VastPark users will have access to them to build their own virtual spaces.

TurboSquid CEO Matt Wisdom explained the benefit on their end: “Our independent sellers, the artists who create all the content for sale at our site, will now enjoy increased exposure to a new and incredibly vast marketplace of users.”

Next up, VastPark also revealed it would be running its virtual economy on Twofish's Elements engine. That means each VastPark user who creates an online world will be able to create and administrate their own individual currencies, set the valuation of their own goods, and manage their own markets. In other words, user-generated words may now have user-generated economies, too.

VastPark founder and CEO Bruce Joy explained, "This is a new step in bringing economic power to the masses. We also see it as a fundamental way for us to build value in our platform, as it allows for the creation of realistic, responsive and highly customizable virtual worlds.”

At his Indie MMO Game Developers Conference keynote, online worlds vet and MUD co-creator Dr. Richard Bartle imagined three vastly different scenarios for the future of MMOs, from The Good, The Bad to The Ugly, acting as an impromptu - and entertaining - futurist for the entire genre.

Bartle has been a veteran in online worlds since he co-wrote the first multi-user dungeon in 1978. At the Indie MMO Game Developers Conference in Minnesota, he addressed the question, "Where will virtual worlds be in ten years?"

Bartle said he's surprised that virtual worlds have come so far -- but that there's still further to go, and he remains essentially unimpressed.

Hit the jump for the full keynote.

Nickelodeon/MTVN Kids and Family Group has announced it plans to develop and produce additional virtual worlds to join its portfolio of online multiplayer games for kids.

The company plans to add to its existing Neopets and Nicktropolis properties with a world based on Nick's SpongeBob SquarePants cartoon, as well as other projects based around new IP such as working-titled Monkey World and a new "virtual destination" called Neopia.

According to the company, Neopia is in production and is scheduled to launch in the next year. All the new products will be developed out of Nickelodeon Kids and Family Group's Virtual World Studios, which focuses on developing virtual destinations for kids, teens, 'tweens and families each year, while building on existing ones.

Neopia will be built on existing play patterns established in Neopets, featuring multiplayer geared toward 'tweens but aimed at all-ages appeal. It will include games, a community, in-world chat, and customization, among other activities, and an in-depth storyline.

The new efforts join plans to add new games and areas within Nicktropolis, each centered around new and upcoming Nickelodeon television properties.

Executive VP of Digital Media Steve Youngwood commented, "For our audiences, virtual worlds are the convergence of gaming, entertainment and community online, and by announcing these new worlds, we are ensuring that our content pipeline is going to remain fresh and vibrant."

He added, "We are very fortunate to have a digital production studio that, like our linear animation studio in Burbank, will be dedicated to creating great new content experiences for our audiences both with our existing brands and properties and new, original ones."

Is there really such a thing as a "casual MMO"? At IMGDC, RebelMonkey co-founder and Diner Dash creator Nick Fortugno outlined the unique way in which multiplayer online games are viewed from the perspective of the casual space -- to explain why he feels they're about to take over the market.

Fortugno was originally supposed to address the audience at IMGDC on "What Your Mother and Your Ten Year-Old Can Teach you About MMOs." However, when he noted how "on the ball" the attendees of IMGDC seemed, he decided to diverge a bit.

Some background on Fortugno's company: RebelMonkey hasn't yet launched, but is on the verge. In addition to Web 2.0 social gaming, they also do more general games work in the casual genre. For now, though, Fortugno's better known for his previous role with Gamelab, where he created Diner Dash.

Fortugno told the audience that when he’s at casual games conferences, he hears a lot of discussion of MMOs, but when they talk online gaming they mean something very specific – not always what MMO designers see as their subject matter.

Hit the jump to read more.