GDC Online will be held in Austin from Oct. 5-8, so we sat down with these two industry veterans to discuss the convention and the past, present and future of online gaming.

ZAM: Do you see it as a platform that will feature more intensive games, or one that will act more as an extension of the online gaming experience through applications?

Matt: It'll happen eventually. I don't think this current generation will support the games of the level that Gordon and I are working on, but you can play full games on the iPad right now. There are MMOs out there that let you chat with players and play online. The graphics aren't as intense as they are in the bigger MMOs, but they are certainly viable, fun games.

Gordon: Every platform has things it's better at and things it's not as good at. Whatever platform you're playing on, the players want to feel like the game is really optimized for that platform. You're not going to do the same kind of game on the Nintendo DS as you're going to do on an iPad, even though they're both kind of handheld formats. The interface conventions are different and the consumer expectations are different. So I just think that every platform is its own world where you can have entertainment happen. How that entertainment is going to happen exactly is rarely exactly like another platform. It's going to be some blend.

ZAM: That's a good way of putting it. You could be on Facebook playing a game that's quite different from a triple-A MMO, but it's still a fun online game that lets you interact with other players.

Gordon: A lot of the gaming elements are common. The delivery mechanism may be different, but the elements aren't going to be all that different.

ZAM: One of the trends at GDC immediately caught my eye: "Core MMOs still exist, and big budget bets are still out there." Star Wars: The Old Republic and ZeniMax are specifically mentioned, so this is your area of expertise. What can players look forward to with triple-A MMOs in the future?

Matt: Triple-A MMOs are a market segment just like there are plenty of other market segments. It just happens that the market segment we're in is dominated by World of Warcraft right now. So to compete in that market you've got to make a game that's comparable on a polished and graphic scale to World of Warcraft. I hate to throw out the words "World of Warcraft" all the time, but there's an entire generation of online players who look at World of Warcraft as their definition of a triple-A MMO. It defines the level of what we have to do to compete. That makes it difficult to compete, obviously. You need a lot of resources. It just means that a lot of game developers have gone the simpler route of not competing with it at all and making lighter, casual games with micro-transactions and so forth.

That market segment of subscription-based triple-A games, probably with some micro-transactions revenue support, is still a market, and a lot of people are competing in that market. I can think of games that just came out recently; Aion came out, Warhammer Online came out, Star Wars: The Old Republic is going to come out at some point, Guild Wars 2 is in that market, there are a bunch of games that are in that market segment right now. It's still very viable, and people are still competing in it.

Gordon: I think there are a lot of niche possibilities, too. You say triple-A MMOs compete with WoW, but I don't think it necessarily means that. We're really talking about the client-delivered subscription-based (or primarily subscription-based) market that still exists outside of WoW. WoW kind of overshadows everything else currently because if its dominance and the fact that it brought so many new players into the actual genre of play. The last time that has happened was when EverQuest got really popular and brought a few million people in. Now there are tens of millions of people who play WoW. It raised the audience level pretty dramatically.

Darryl Gangloff, Editor-in-Chief

Check out the second half of the interview to see what else Gordon Walton and Matt Firor had to say about GDC Online.