3pointD.com

Take them for what you will, but press releases this week from two new gaming portals indicate to 3pointD that the momentum of games as a major entertainment medium continues, as does the migration of more and more gamers online. The services are Verizon’s PlayLinc, which lets gamers host their own FPS and other servers for free, and Ijji.com, a free single- and multi-player portal for more casual gamers from Korean game company NHN, which comes complete with a little customizable avatar to represent your online presence (though I couldn’t get the avatar creation screen to work on my Mac, for some reason — finally got it going in IE on my PC).

That PlayLinc lets gamers host their games for free is a great service, made possible by sponsorships from game companies and the like, according to the site. PlayLinc has been criticized as being not up to hardcore snuff, but those were early days and it remains to be seen whether or not the service will do its thing. If it works at all, though, it should radically reduce the barrier to entry for a lot of gamers who would like to host their own servers but can’t afford the time or money to set up a server of their own. This is the kind of thing that could be an excellent tool for building community among all the fraggers and strat-heads out there. The Verizon Game Network provides a community site with forums, etc., devoted to the service.

Ijji, as noted, is for slightly less hardcore players, but there seems to be a robust multiplayer community already. The site also incents play in interesting ways. While you can buy Ijji Coin using real-world coin, you can also earn gems and other ranking markers by putting in time and earning high scores.

Of course, there’s already a huge community of casual gamers in the U.S. on sites like Yahoo! Games. But new competition in the market looks set to drag in a gaming cohort that’s been underserved by current offerings, according to research firm Parks Associates. Parks has a new study out indicating that the middle of the online gaming market, what they call “social gamers, leisure gamers and dormant gamers,” accounts for 53 percent of the Internet gaming population, and 56 percent of retail revenue. They’re also predicting that the online game market in North America will grow from $1.1 billion in 2005 to $4.4 billion in 2010, according to Gamasutra.

Why is 3pointD interested? Because anything that gets gamers together online in shared spaces (even 2D spaces like the hilarious game of Gunbound Revolution I just played — much to the chagrin of the people who actually knew what they were doing) is something that points toward a more 3pointD world, if only because more of the real world is getting acclimated to such places earlier on. Making it easier to host one’s own servers could be a key to building 3pointD communities. What would be really interesting would be a service like this that includes some games or spaces that feature user-generated content. In any case, I’ll be interested to see where these two new services fit into what is clearly a growing market, and what seems to be continued momentum into 3D online spaces.