[Here's news from our GDC colleagues about the expanded GDC Austin board -- into which the Worlds In Motion Summit is being folded this year. Don't forget to submit now if you have an online game proposal.]

GDC Austin organizers have announced an expanded Advisory Board for the 'connected gaming'-centric September event, adding Nexon, SOE and EA/Mythic notables to the filled-out board.

The event, to be held September 15th-18th, 2009 at the Austin Convention Center in Texas, has added advisory board members including Nexon's Min Kim (MapleStory), EA/Mythic's Eugene Evans (Warhammer Online), Sony Online Entertainment's John Blakely (DC Universe Online), and Hangout Industries and former Disney exec Mike Goslin (Pirates Of The Caribbean Online), as well as Schell Games' Sheri Graner Ray.

They join existing board members such as BioWare Austin's Rich Vogel and Gordon Walton (Star Wars: The Old Republic), Metaplace's Raph Koster and Zenimax Online Studios' Matt Firor.

“The online gaming space continues to change and expand. GDC Austin addresses the latest trends and challenges in connected gaming,” commented event director Izora de Lillard in relation to the appointments and the main portion of GDC Austin, which will take place Wed-Fri, September 16th-18th.

In addition, GDC Austin will feature both existing and new 2-day Summits. Firstly, the Game Audio and Game Writer Summits will continue their long-running association with Austin.

It's also been revealed for the first time that two new Summits - an iteration of the breakout successful Independent Games Summit and the newly introduced iPhone Game Summit, will also debut on September 15-16, 2009.

Initial advisory board, lecture and submission details for the Indie and iPhone Games Summits at Austin will be revealed next week.

Online registration for GDC Austin opens in early June, and for more information on GDC Austin and the advisory board, interested parties can visit the official GDC Austin website.

After seeing a drop in fiscal 2008 profits, NCsoft has started 2009 with solid financial results for its first quarter ended March 31.

NCsoft said numbers were up because it was able to generate major revenues with its new MMORPG, Aion, which launched in Korea in Q4 2008, as well as maintain stable Asian sales of its flagship franchise Lineage.

For Q1, NCsoft reported sales of KRW 133.4 billion ($107.7 million), a 51 percent rise over the same period a year ago. Operating income rose sharply to KRW 42.5 billion ($34.3 million), an increase of 128 percent year-on-year. Net income also saw a steep rise to KRW 33.5 billion ($27 million), a 315 percent year-on-year rise.

NCsoft's Aion was able to capture the most sales on a per title basis for NCsoft during Q1, generating KRW 42.65 billion ($34.57 million), nearly as much as Lineage 1 and Lineage 2 made combined.

The company said during a conference call that Aion started its open beta last year with 25 servers, and today it has reached 41. NCsoft hopes to launch the game globally by the end of the year.

Social game developer Zynga says it now has 10 million daily active users across all the platforms it serves, including Facebook -- where it claims the spot of number one app developer.

Zynga's games, including Texas Hold'Em Poker, Mafia Wars, YoVille and Scramble, are served across other social networks including MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, Tagged and Yahoo!, as well as on the iPhone.

San Francisco-based Zynga claims 40,819,426 monthly active users according to official stat tracker AllFacebook, and 40,483,500 monthly active users on metrics measurer AppData, and says it "continues to experience substantial growth."

Just last month, the venture-funded company hired two new execs, one to head up the company's initiatives further into iPhone development, and the other to lead a new internal studio.

"To think that a city the size of London is playing our games on a daily basis is incredible," says Zynga CEO Mark Pincus. "Our growth is a testament to the talents of Zynga game developers and their dedication to making fun and social games that everyone loves."

"The momentum we’re seeing indicates that the social gaming space is as significant as we expected it to be and that our games are touching the lives of people all over the world."

MMO firm Resistor Productions has announced the debut of browser-based online battle and strategy game Disciple, with 12,000 pre-registered users already on-deck to play.

According to a press release, Disciple’s original fantasy world, Aphelion, "...is persistent and for adults, as it’s extremely brutal and violent with bloody battles to the death. Disciple is player vs. player (PvP) – a player’s opponents are live as are their allies, aligning, fighting and strategizing in real-time to gain experience points, powerful weapons and armor, and increase in player ranking."

In the game, the creation of each player’s unique “disciple” determines his or her life foundation, strengths and play-style, and all players compete for "geldors" (money) based on battle wins and losses. There is also the option to create or join a clan of disciples to determine allies and enemies within the world – powerfully crushing foes en mass.

“I wanted to take MMORPGs to the next level with Disciple and its ability to be played anywhere yet be challenging, graphically rich, engaging – even addictive,” said Tobias Batton, Founder and CEO of Resistor Productions. “Disciple is all about creating a character that is an extension of the player’s personality, and watching it grow and become more powerful, no matter where the player is or what their circumstance."

Online game publisher NCsoft revealed today City of Heroes Going Rogue, the first full-blown expansion to the PC-based superhero subscription MMORPG since 2005's City of Villains.

Developed by NCsoft-owned Paragon Studios in Mountain View, Calif., Going Rogue will allow hero characters to become villains, and villains to become heroes, blurring the line between good and evil, NCsoft said.

The company said that "clearly marked missions, in addition to behaviors and decisions made by the player, will move a hero’s or villain’s moral compass, which could eventually change the hero’s or villain’s alignment."

Two new "primary fictional characters" will make a debut in the expansion: hero-gone-rogue Maelstrom and the redeemed demon summoning villain Desdemona.

Paragon also recently launched City of Heroes' user-generated Mission Architect system, which facilitated the creation of 20,000 arcs in its first week of availability.

With no major expansion since 2005, City of Heroes' viability within NCsoft's portfolio has shrunk. The franchise, which also includes City of Villains, made up just five percent of overall revenues ($5.5 million) for the company in the past quarter, according to NCsoft's earnings results this week.

Gamasutra estimates break this figure up into $500,000 of retail sales of the packaged game versions, plus an average $13 per month subscription rate for the MMO -- which officially retails for $15 per month with multi-month discounts.

If these estimated figures -- extrapolated out to work out unique monthly subscribers -- are correct, this means City Of Heroes/Villains might currently have around 150,000 worldwide subscribers.

VC-funded firm Vector Entertainment has been talking to WorldsInMotion.biz about its Vector City Racers, a browser-based, kid-focused online vehicle racing MMO developed by partner MCS Games.

Vector Entertainment was previously known as Webcarzz, and received $4 million in funding in August 2008 to create microtransaction-based online games - this is its first title.

In this case, the firm has gone for something relatively rare in browser-based games - a real-time, twitch-based racing title. Its proprietary Flash 10-based V3D engine allows real-time 3D object rendering in-browser, depth of field/blur effects, and the company says its architecture is optimized for responsiveness with high frame rates.

The V3D engine joins a number of other real-time technologies for playing multiplayer browser games, including the Unity Engine, as used in Cartoon Network's Fusionfall MMO, and InstantAction.com's wrapper-based 3D solution.

The company had a vision for Vector City Racers, and the only way to actualize it was to roll its own tech, Vector CEO Chris Bergstresser tells us.

In this round-up, we highlight some of the notable jobs posted in big sister site Gamasutra's industry-leading game jobs section this week, including positions from Blizzard, Blue Castle, Ubisoft and more.

Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.

It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone games, 'serious games', independent games and more.

Some of the notable jobs posted in each market area this week include:

In an in-depth new Gamasutra interview, Cryptic's Bill Roper discusses World Of Warcraft's unprecedented success, suggesting that its 11 million subscribers is a "totally ridiculous goal" for MMO creators.

Although Roper never worked directly on World of Warcraft, the Blizzard veteran and key figure on the Diablo franchise recalls how anxious the atmosphere was at the game's launch, when the team realized they'd have to gain nearly 1 million users to earn their investment back -- in an era when the most popular MMO, EverQuest, had only about 345,000.

"How are we ever going to do that?" he recalls wondering at the time. "Then, it was like, 'Wow, can we do that?' 300,000 was a ridiculous number."

Of course, the rest is history -- WoW is now one of the most successful games of all time, with over to 11 million users.

But Roper, who went on to co-found ultimately ill-fated Hellgate: London creator Flagship Studios, sees a downside: "People look at the success of World of Warcraft -- publishers or fans, everybody looks at the success of that -- and they go, 'Oh, well, a great MMO? That's 11 million.'"

"No, that's one," he says. "That's one game that's done that. No one else in the West has been even close. And I think it's challenging from the standpoint that gets looked at as an expectation or a goal to hit. It's a totally ridiculous goal to try to be hitting -- 'Oh, we're gonna go build an MMO that's going to compete with that.'."

"I don't think any game at Blizzard, we never sat around and said, 'Oh, we're going to sell six million copies of the game.'"

In the full feature, Roper discusses his work at Cryptic on MMO Champions Online, plus a career retrospective that includes everything from recruitment to the painful lessons he's learned -- and how failure can teach you more than success (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from other websites).