GDC Online organizers are reminding potential attendees that today is the last day to save up to 40% on passes to the October 5th-8th event in Austin, TX, fully detailing the comprehensive exhibit floor, Summits, keynotes, a PlayStation Home developer day and more.

The Austin, Texas based GDC Online conference -- formerly known as GDC Austin -- is mainly focused on the development of online games, including free-to-play titles, social network games, and traditional MMOs, with a veteran online game industry advisory board evaluating and selecting the lectures.

There are now more than 120 panels, lectures and tutorials currently scheduled for the event -- including the recently announced keynote from Civilization II designer and now Zynga chief game designer Brian Reynolds (FrontierVille), and just-debuted track keynotes from Blizzard on Battle.net, Raph Koster on social design trends, and European browser game giant BigPoint on its rise to success.

These lectures join a full set of highlighted lectures including Main Conference talks on October 6th-8th from Relic, Sony Online, Carbine, KingsIsle, IMVU, Disney, Playdom, BioWare Austin, Hangout Industries, Broken Bulb Studios, CCP, Gaia Online, Playfish, InstantAction, Ubisoft and a host of other notable companies at the leading worldwide online game-specific conference.

One of the other major advantages of attending GDC Online is the comprehensive list of nearly 90 exhibitors with whom attendees are able to get product demonstrations, meet, and interact on the vibrant GDC Online Expo Floor. These include major firms like Epic, Rackspace, Gaikai, Offerpal, Vindicia, Trinigy, ARIN, Versant, Rixty, Softlayer, and many other notable companies in the space.

South Korean online game publisher NCsoft revealed that Guild Wars has sold more than 6.5 million copies worldwide since the episodic action MMORPG launched five year ago (When the firm last shared sales figures for the title in April 2009, Guild Wars had sold 6 million units).

Around half of those sales took place in Europe, the company told consumer site Joystiq. NCsoft noted that Guild Wars' largest regional audience is in Germany, where it allowed the public to play the PC MMO's upcoming sequel for the first time at Gamescom last month.

Developed by NCsoft subsidiary ArenaNet, the first Guild Wars episode released in April 2005, followed by two episodes, Factions and Nightfall, and the Eye of the North expansion. The company is currently working on Guild Wars 2 and says it intends to release the game "when it's done".

While gamers must first buy a Guild Wars episode to play the game, the MMO does not require monthly subscriptions to play (users cannot access some content without buying all of the episodes). Guild Wars 2 will feature a similar subscription-less model.

Paris-based media and telecommunications giant Vivendi SA has today increased its profit expectations for 2010, despite reporting a drop in second-quarter net profit.

The company, which owns a 52 percent majority shareholding in video game publisher, Activision Blizzard Inc., said its profits for the second quarter ended June 30 slipped 3.7 percent to 669 million euros ($856.4 million) from 695 million euros ($889.7 million) last year.

But Vivendi said it still expects growth in earnings before income and taxes, and a higher adjusted profit than the one recorded in 2009, an increase it specifically puts down to growth in its video game division, aided by Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and other titles at its Activision Blizzard unit.

Sales during the quarter were 7.06 billion euros ($9 billion), up 6.2 percent from 6.65 billion euros ($8.85 billion) for the same quarter a year prior.

Jean-Bernard Levy, chief executive of Vivendi said: "Our most recent strategic acquisitions, GVT, Activision Blizzard and SFR broadband and fixed, achieved excellent operating performances."

The publisher, created in 2008 when Vivendi bought a controlling stake in Activision Inc. and merged it with its Blizzard Entertainment business, grew faster than analysts had expected. Last month, it said it would buy back $1 billion in shares and pay its first dividend.

"Activision Blizzard had a much stronger performance than the year before,” Levy said. “The contribution of Activision Blizzard [to Vivendi] has become very significant.” The publisher, whose titles include Guitar Hero, World of Warcraft, and StarCraft II, had revenue of 3 billion euros ($3.8 billion) in 2009, accounting for 11 percent of total Vivendi sales.

Activision Blizzard has recently reaffirmed its calendar year 2010 outlook saying that it expects net revenues of $4.4 billion and $0.72 earnings per share.

Despite these positive projections, Vivendi remains locked in a U.S. legal battle with investors who say the company lied to them about its performance under former CEO Jean-Marie Messier. In January, a jury ruled investors were misled 57 times between 2000 and 2002. Vivendi is appealing the ruling, which the plantiffs’ law firm has reported could lead to $9.3 billion in damages.

A day before the GDC Online early deadline, the major October 5th-8th Austin-based event has added track keynotes from Blizzard's Greg Canessa (on Battle.net), Playdom's Raph Koster (on social mechanics), and Bigpoint's Heiko Hubertz (on the rise of Europe in online gaming).

The Austin, Texas based GDC Online conference -- formerly known as GDC Austin -- is sharply focused on the development of online games, including free-to-play titles, social network games, and traditional MMOs, with a veteran online game industry advisory board evaluating and selecting the lectures.

There are now more than 120 panels, lectures and tutorials currently scheduled for the October 5th-8th event -- and following the announcement of a keynote from Civilization II designer and now Zynga chief game designer Brian Reynolds (FrontierVille), three track keynotes are debuting.

The brand-new track keynotes across the GDC Online Main Conference, which takes place from Wednesday October 6th to Friday October 8th, and for which majorly discounted passes are only available until Wednesday, are:

- In a production track keynote called 'Battle.net: A Postmortem', Blizzard's Battle.net project director Greg Canessa and technical director Matt Versluys will present an extremely rare lecture from the World Of Warcraft and Starcraft II creators, "sharing lessons learned from building and launching the new iteration of an online game service that connects and powers all Blizzard titles."

- Playdom's VP of creative design Raph Koster -- a stalwart of online game design from Ultima Online through Star Wars Galaxies to his current work in social games -- presents a design track keynote, 'Classic Social Mechanics: The Engines Behind Everything Multiplayer'.

As sister site Gamasutra reaches the milestone of one million unique monthly readers and nearly 450,000 registered users, the leading video game art and business site is announcing notable new contributors including Simon Parkin, Chris Morris and Kyle Orland.

Cementing its position as the largest, most-trafficked website in the game development and business space, internal Omniture traffic numbers for July 2010 revealed over 3.3 million page views from more than 1 million unique readers for Gamasutra.com alone -- with hundreds of thousands of others reading related sites such as GameCareerGuide.com and IndieGames.com.

In addition, following the departure of editor at large Chris Remo to become Community Manager at Irrational Games (BioShock Infinite), the site has added multiple new contributors to bolster its cutting-edge coverage of all facets of the video game business.

Joining existing core staff -- including news director Leigh Alexander, senior news editor Kris Graft and features director Christian Nutt -- will be Simon Parkin as the site's European editor, providing UK-timed news and original reporting for the site.

Less than a year after rival monetization company Live Gamer hired her, industry icon Stevana "Stevie" Case has joined in-game commerce network PlaySpan as vice president of sales.

While at PlaySpan, which provides monetization services for more than 1,000 online titles, social networks, and videos, Case is tasked with overseeing the firm's efforts to generate new business leads while also supporting the overall sales team on its existing business initiatives and partnerships.

She joined Live Gamer, another microtransaction solutions provider for online games and social networks, just last January, and served as senior director of business development for the company. Prior to that, she was VP of business development and sales at another in-game commerce firm, Fatfoogoo.

Case first caught the industry's attention as a female professional gamer after she beat John Romero in a Quake deathmatch, joining the Quake-designer's studio Ion Storm shortly afterward. She served as a tester and level designer there before partnering with Romero and Tom Stone to co-found Monkeystone Games, where she was CEO until 2003.

This news comes just just a few weeks after PlaySpan raised $18 million in a Series C round of funding, which it plans to put toward expanding its European and Asian expansion, as well as growing its publisher network and userbase.

"Stevie is a widely respected figure in the gaming industry and she has a combination of passion, professionalism, and knowledge that is unmatched," says PlaySpan CEO Karl Mehta. "We are very exciting to add her talents and business acumen to our work force, where we will be able to leverage her experience and contacts to expand our presence globally."

Large cash reserves led to complacency and a lack of discipline, according to an ex-RealTime Worlds staffer discussing the Scottish developer's recent closure and poor sales of APB.

"We got all this money, and it made us relax, when really it should have focused our attention on making sure we had a really good approach to managing the project, to ensuring the design was exactly what it needed to be, to focus testing early on, and just proving that we were doing the right thing, rather than taking the old 'it'll be done when it's done' attitude," an anonymous source told The Guardian.

Realtime Worlds went into administration on August 24th, 2010, cutting 150 jobs and having spent an alleged $105 million in funding. The majority of this money was spent on APB, the company’s flagship 'cops and robbers' multiplayer online game, with development difficulties channeling funding away from the studio’s second project, social media game, Project MyWorld.

Fears of financial trouble were felt at the studio months before the closure. "The first hint we got was, a few months before APB launched, the company started – quite bizarrely – to make cleaners redundant," said the source. "Later, rumors started coming in that redundancies were imminent. And then RTW let all the contractors go early, which was another sign that money was running out. But they said everything was fine."

Then, on 13th August the news broke that the entire Project MyWorld team was being laid off. "APB continues to be our primary development focus, and we remain fully committed to the game and its players," said the official company statement. "We were told that the budget for the game had been spent on APB," said the source.

The reputation of the studio’s CEO, Dave Jones, best known as the creator of Grand Theft Auto, also contributed to the sense of complacency. "When you're working for someone like Dave, it's all too easy to not believe what your ears and eyes, and QA and beta testers are telling you," said the Guardian source. "You're like: 'Dave knows what he's doing, it's going to be fine'."

"The team was saying for a long, long time that there were things that were not quite right with the game… It was never the case that the design was fundamentally broken, but in the execution of a lot of the features there are things that didn't quite come together, that weren't polished to the level that people expected," continues the source.

The length of the development and management structure also contributed to the project’s failure, said a second source, an ex-staff member from the studio’s second project, Project MyWorld. "The middle management – and there was a LOT of middle management at this company – they were on that game for years and they continued to run it as though they were managing an architecture project or something.

"Fun never seemed to be a criterion for what they were doing; managers with little clipboards would go around and tick off things, saying 'OK that's done' and moving on. There was never any consideration for whether or not what had been done was any fun."

Lars Buttler, CEO of VC-funded online game developer Trion Worlds said that his studio's to-be-released fantasy MMO, Rift: Planes of Telara costs tens of millions of dollars to create.

"Rift: Planes of Telara is already very ambitious because it is over $50 million in development," he said in an interview with Develop. The game is slated to release next year.

Buttler helped found Trion in 2006, and the company has since raised $100 million in venture capital from investors including GE/NBC and Time Warner, among others.

Trion has yet to release a game, but currently has three projects in development: an MMO/real-time strategy game called End of Nations, created with Star Wars: Empire at War studio Petroglyph; Rift: Planes of Telara; and a "transmedia" MMO in development with TV network SyFy.

The SyFy project could be the most groundbreaking if Trion is able to execute -- events in the TV show will reportedly be replicated in the game, and events of the game could be integrated into the TV show.

Buttler added, "One of the first questions we asked before we started the Rift project was, 'why cannot online games be of the quality of video games?' We felt that, sooner or later, the whole [MMO sector] will have to go down this route."