David Brevik discusses how to make a world with more than one Spider-man, Diablo 3-style auction houses, and PVP in a new interview.

Gazillion Entertainment president David Brevik is an interesting figure in the modern video game landscape. His current project is Marvel Heroes, a free-to-play MMO based on Marvel Comics. All of them. Every super hero from the pantheon, from the X-Men to Spider-man to Rocket Raccoon, is in his new loot-focused role-playing game. Even with Iron Man and Wolverine on board though, tackling the loot RPG market is a dicey proposition in a year when Diablo III owns the field.

Brevik’s the man to do it though. After all, he created Diablo. During his tenure as Blizzard North president, Brevik acted as lead designer and lead programmer on both Diablo and Diablo II. He’s also responsible for Blizzard’s worst game ever, the Super Nintendo super hero fighter Justice League Task Force. So he’s got a lot to prove with Marvel Heroes: First, that he can make a free-to-play loot RPG as accessibly addictive as his classic series and that he’s going to do super heroes right.

In a new interview with Spong, Brevik addressed the problem of making an MMO where every player may want to play as the same character. How do you convince people to play as weird characters like Speedball when they just want to be Spidey? You don’t. “It’s pretty well balanced as each one of the characters has been designed to be played with differing styles. So the way that my Spider-man plays may be different in the way your Spider-man plays. This is something I did when working on Diablo and Diablo II, as for example the Amazon I decided to go with bows for her and then spears and things like that.”

How will people pay for those perks though? Since Marvel Heroes is a free to play game, some expect that kitting out a character might include paying out the nose in a real money auction house like the kind in Diablo III. “The auction house stuff that Marvel Heroes will have will be much more similar to a traditional MMO,” says Brevik, “It will be more akin to World of Warcraft where you put something up in the auction house. We’re going to have a lot of items that actually bind to your character so a lot of the best items you can’t really sell them so that’s our philosophy on the issue of item acquisition.”

Brevik also teased Player vs. Player content for the super hero MMO. “[PvP] would be a lot of fun, wouldn’t it?”

Microsoft seeks OnLive staff. Streaming video game service will be a key battleground for Sony and Microsoft in the next console generation.

Sony’s got Gaikai, but Microsoft might have OnLive to counter it. In a manner of speaking that is.

OnLive’s dissolution as an independent company was not just abrupt but unexpected. People knew full well that the cloud-based streaming video game business was still a limited niche, but no one understood quite how meager an audience OnLive had for such a massive operation. With a rumored 1800 users playing on millions of dollars worth of servers, OnLive was captaining a battle-ready navy on what was essentially a pond. New owners and past investor Laudner Partners is committed to developing OnLive’s place in the nascent on-demand gaming business though. Founder and CEO Steve Perlman is staying on with the reborn company but it’s unknown how much of the original staff will be re-hired after Laudner laid off everyone.

Many of those employees may find new employment in Redmond, Washington though. Microsoft is actively recruiting OnLive’s former staff. GamesIndustry International spotted a posting from Microsoft seeking OnLive staff.

“We are eager to speak to individuals and teams affected by the OnLive transition. With the stunning success of Xbox/Kinect and accelerated growth of this business, we are looking to add key players who want to make a real impact in creating groundbreaking new products and services.”

There were rumors just after OnLive officially opened for business in 2010 that Microsoft was courting the company for acquisition. Those rumors reappeared after Sony purchased OnLive’s main competitor Gaikai in June. Former employees of OnLive anonymously said that part of the reason the company failed is that Perlman refused to sell the company to interested buyers. Given its interest in OnLive talent, it would seem that Microsoft was one of those interested parties.

The posting is also telling about Microsoft’s plans for the Xbox 720, sometimes called Durango. Based on Sony and Microsoft’s recent activity, streaming game content is going to be a central service of both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox 720. This was an inevitability. It will be interesting to see though how Microsoft integrates that streaming service into its already successful Xbox business. Is cloud-based streaming game content going to be the core of Xbox Live? Microsoft is going to have difficulty going forward convincing new Xbox owners to pay for online multiplayer. It’s already experimenting with free-to-play content, signaling that transition. If streaming replaces current Xbox Live Gold services though, Microsoft will need to best the quality offered by OnLive.

South Korean court finds Apple and Samsung are infringing each other’s patents and imposes a small fine and limited ban on both companies.

The patent war between Apple and Samsung has many fronts. Before we heard that Samsung lost a billion dollar case in the US on Friday, a three-judge panel in the Seoul Central District Court found that both companies had infringed patents and decided on a limited ban on national sales of various devices.

These devices banned from sale in South Korea:

• iPhone 3GS
• iPhone 4
• iPad
• iPad 2
• Samsung’s Galaxy S
• Galaxy S2
• Galaxy Tab
• Galaxy Tab 10.1

Just to make that slap on the wrist sting a little more, the court also imposed fines for damages of $35,300 on Apple and $22,000 on Samsung. Apparently, Samsung was found guilty of violating Apple’s “bounce back” patent, a feature that lets you know when you’ve scrolled to the end of something with a fun little animation. Apple’s infringement related to Samsung’s telecom standards and technology concerned with the transfer and transmission of data between devices.

It’s nice to see both sides losing out in the courtroom, but these paltry fines are hardly going to discourage them. The sales bans should have more of an impact, but since they are related to older devices it seems unlikely that either company will be overly concerned.

This battle, on home turf for Samsung, is a sideshow to the main event. In the U.S. trial Apple now seeking to ban many Samsung devices and Samsung is itching for an appeal.