Our sister site Gamasutra recently spoke with Jane Pinckard, content director for the Austin Game Developers Conference to be held September 5-7th at the Austin Convention Center in Texas. This year's event includes a focus on virtual worlds along with MMO games, as Jane discusses in this salient excerpt:

What’s new in the MMO game space this year at the show?

We have a keynote by Hiromichi Tanaka, the producer of Final Fantasy XI. The thing that’s really compelling about that game for our advisory board is that it’s a multiplatform MMO, which is really difficult to do. You have players on PCs and on consoles interacting, and that’s a huge technical challenge that they were able to roll out successfully.

Another trend has really been RMTs and microtransactions – as a general category, it would be “alternative revenue streams.” MMOs are traditionally subscription-based, but there’s all these new things going on, particularly in the Asian markets, where there are virtual items sales and different ways of monetizing the consumer, so that’s been a very strong trend. We have several sessions that address that and how it’s being done in Asia and how those models can be applied to US markets.

What’s going on specifically for the virtual worlds-specific audience?

Well, there’s a little bit of a debate about whether virtual worlds belong with gaming and game development. But World of Warcraft is a virtual world; they’ve built a virtual world that happens to be part of a very structured game experience. So it’s not open-ended like Second Life or other titles that are tied to marketing initiatives and other products. However, there’s a lot of things going on in virtual worlds that I think can be applied to the game market, and I think that the advisory board has selected certain things [to reflect that].

One of the keynotes is Sulka Haro, and he’s the lead designer on Habbo Hotel. That’s not strictly a game, but there are some cool things being done in that world that can impact games, and might be successfully applied to games. Also, the social aspects of virtual worlds have a lot of interesting possibilities for games – combining a virtual world with social networking applications, as Habbo Hotel does.

There’s also a panel on making money in virtual worlds that focuses on Second Life, but of course people have been making money off of online games for a long time. So I guess it’s about “what can games learn from virtual worlds?”

We go back and forth at the advisory board about this. I don’t see that a distinction is necessarily very helpful [between games and online worlds]. There are a lot of things that virtual worlds are making strong progress that I think games could benefit from, like handling transactions. Though, things like the Station Exchange auction system, where users can trade items officially with Sony Online’s blessing – that’s an interesting step in that direction.

You can now read the complete interview at Gamasutra.